


Under the Curve (Witness Me)

by coldhope



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Nux Lives, playing Can You? with the Rig rollover, post-movie: nobody is okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-04 17:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4147293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The kid's eyes were blue.</i>
</p>
<p>  <i>Max notices things without knowing he's noticed them, these days. Little fragments of image, of memory, stick in the churned mess of his head like slivers of glass: too small to bleed, they fester.</i></p>
<p>  <i>Of all the things he can't now forget about the past few days, this is not an important one, but it keeps coming back. How blue the kid's eyes had been, in his wasted face, powdered white and smudged black with the War Boys' skull paint. How wide and how blue.</i></p>
<p>  <i>It keeps coming back.</i></p>
<p>~</p>
<p>Out here, everything hurts: as King once said, the spiritual state of unbelief is desperation. Leaving the Citadel alone after the survivors' triumphant return in the battered Gigahorse, the voices in Max's head are silent, but he finds himself changing course for the wreck of the War Rig nonetheless, not sure what he's expecting to find, not sure what he's hoping for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The definite integral in a plot of concentration of drug in blood plasma against time describes the _area under the curve_. The time it takes for the plasma concentration of something to halve its steady-state is known as its _plasma half-life_. 
> 
> The name of the game here is _[Can You?](http://www.8reader.com/misery-stephen-king?page=0,64)_ and it's the game every fic author plays, all the time. Can You get Careless Corrigan away from the lions? Can You take this cliffhanger and find a way out of it? Here the situation is _the War Rig rolled and Nux is presumed dead. Can You?_
> 
> And I say: _yes. Because it didn't explode._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now [available on tumblr](http://ceruleancynic.tumblr.com/post/121887654844/via) in audio form, read by me without a lot of technological assistance.

The kid's eyes were blue. 

Max notices things without knowing he's noticed them, these days. Little fragments of image, of memory, stick in the churned mess of his head like slivers of glass: too small to bleed, they fester. 

Of all the things he can't now forget about the past few days, _this_ is not an important one, but it keeps coming back. How blue the kid's eyes had been, in his wasted face, powdered white and smudged black with the War Boys' skull paint. How wide and how _blue_.

It keeps coming back. 

He watches the Citadel scurry and clamor like a kicked anthill as the world undergoes its change. He doesn't know how Furiosa and the others will go about the business of rebuilding; he doesn't much care. This is not his world now. For a brief time he was in it, living in it, caught up like dust in a storm; but now he is moving on.

He had lied to Furiosa, of course: for him there never _would_ be redemption, nothing could make the dead stay dead until he finally joined them. But it was a nice lie, and for a little while he'd almost believed it himself. 

Max's car is gone -- really gone, this time, gone and destroyed and over -- but one thing the former Immortan Joe's Citadel has in volume is machines with wheels. It doesn't take him very long to find one that suits his purpose, or to load it up with water and guzzoline and weapons. No one is riding strapped to his roof or hood, nobody stands ready with grenade-spears or flamethrowers to defend his advance. It is a strange feeling, to be alone again, after such intenseness. He drives out into the desert unchallenged. 

The roar of the unmuffled engine and the wind in his face, the simple clarity of speed, do not feel like redemption: nothing can. But he thinks maybe they remind him a little -- even just a little -- of absolution. 

It surprises him when he turns aside from the road he has chosen, sweeping back across rutted terrain he has now crossed twice before. Hulks of the War Boys' pursuit specials lie along this route, burned-out and crumpled, already dusted with the blowing sand. The next storm to come along will mostly cover them, leaving anonymous drifts with perhaps a wheel-arch or a blower scoop still visible. The dead out here do not have time to go spectacularly rotten before they dry and dwindle. Inside the wrecks, shriveled lips will draw back from dried sand-scoured teeth, papery skin shrinking around ivory finger-bones that still clutch the curve of a wheel, a shift knob. 

Max does not know if there is a Valhalla. He doubts it. The things desiccating in these ruins, under this sun, are beyond answering. Their eyes will be gone soon, if they aren't already. 

_The kid's eyes were blue._

Not like Furiosa's: Furiosa's eyes had hard gold in them as well. He had noticed that sometime along the way. The kid's eyes were a bright, vivid, improbable blue.

Max drives, expecting to hear the voices. Almost wanting to hear them; even terrible things can become comforting in familiarity. He finds himself _trying_ to catch the words: _you let us die._

_You let everybody die._

Witness me, the kid had said, half-crazed with death-fervor. Witness me. And then again, at the end, that bright intensity back, just before he wrenched the wheel hard across and threw the War Rig into a final hellish roll that brought everything to an end: _Witness me._

Max realizes what it is he's doing, and stands on the brakes. The car -- an ungodly mutant based on something like an E-type Jag on huge wheels -- fishtails and throws up a huge cloud of sand. 

_Witness me._

He rests his forehead on the chain-link steering wheel for a moment, feeling the vibration of the engine in his bones, in his teeth. He thinks he has never felt so tired in his whole existence.

"Okay," he says, out loud, and thunks his head against the wheel. "Okay, fine. I'll witness you."

He shifts into gear and the enormous knobbly tires take big bites out of the sand. It isn't far, now, to where the remains of the Rig lie, blocking the canyon. If the kid is there -- if scavengers haven't dragged what's left of him out -- Max will make his mark somehow on the wreck, write the kid's name to mark his resting place. If he's gone, then...

Then he'll figure out something else. 

Max drives a little faster.

~

There are no crows. Crows don't venture this far out into the desert: they keep to their own territory, the slow bitter smokes and mires of the sour ground, the poisoned field, where nothing now is capable of growing. There are no scavengers circling above the wreckage to draw attention from miles around. There is only the smell of death. 

Max knows that smell as well as he knows the voices that hide in his head and speak to him. He has never found it to be sweet, the way some people describe it: to him it is a greenish-black stink, salty and grinning, that boils out from hidden places droning and humming with flies. There are flies here, a lot of them, massed wings singing their idiot song, and that smell is very strong as he gets out of the battered Jag and makes his way toward the wreckage. The humped shape of the long tanker-trailer leans drunkenly across the entrance to the canyon, and he can hear more flies -- a lot more -- beyond its bulk. 

He shivers, once, the healing scars of the blood-bag tattoos prickling all down his back, and his hand drops to the butt of the shotgun in its holster strapped to his right leg. The sense of having been here before is very strong now, very powerful. 

_If you're going to do it_ , says the voice in his head -- and now he doesn't quite know who that voice is, it's changed, it's older, tired, without a lot of patience left -- _then do it, or move on._

Max shakes his head as if to dislodge the voice, the way he has done so many countless times, and it says nothing more. He takes another step, and another, toward the jackknifed trailer, and now he can see the roof of what had been the cab already half-drifted in sand. He looks at it for a long moment, and a lot of those little shards of memory twist and gouge and flicker: he had spent a lot of the past couple days in that black-metal space, looking out at the world through the gap where a windscreen had once been. The flies are very loud now, and the smell of death is heavy, heavier than air, plating his nose and throat. He can taste it, like sour hot metal. 

A few steps closer, and he can see that part of the black paint is not paint at all, but a gleaming, moving carpet of flies; and when he kicks a spray of sand at the flies they take flight in a buzzing angry roar that reveals something huge, something _vast_ that he thinks he last saw standing on the Rig's hood with a torn-off supercharger held above its head.

Rictus Erectus has no eyes at all now, but then again Max had never had much occasion to remark on them. His face appears to be moving. On closer inspection it isn't the remains of the face so much as the things covering it that are moving. He lies with his arms outstretched, pinned from the chest down under the ruins of the cab. The smell is huge now, almost visible, and the roar of the flies fills Max's mind like falling sand, almost, _almost_ loudly enough to drown out the _other_ sound he can just about make out: a sound that he thinks is coming from inside his head. A tiny whisper of breath, not strong enough to be a groan. 

It's a very small sound, and yet it fills the whole world. 

Max drops to his knees beside the half-crushed cab, ignoring the body beside him, and pulls at the crumpled metal of the door. It yields reluctantly, with a rusty squalling sound, but it does yield; and inside, in the delirious heat and stink and fly-roar, inside something moves a little, and cracks open its eyes in brilliant slits of blue. 

"Kid," he says, and his own voice sounds rusty. "Kid. _Nux_. Hold on. Gonna get you out of here."

How the fuck had he survived the rollover, Max thinks. How the fuck had he survived the rollover, sick and used-up and evanescent as he was, drawn down to a thin thread of desperation? How had he survived the rollover _and then gone on surviving?_

His own voice comes back to him, as it sometimes does, talking about the way the world can narrow itself to a singleminded purpose, a solitary instinct: survival. It is a little surprising to find that it works for other people as well as him, and for the first time he lets himself wonder a little about the lives of the War Boys. The half-lives. In the dark, in the dark, feeling their poisoned blood pulse in lips and eyes and the swellings of their tumors, waiting to die, waiting for the chance to die _historic_ on the Fury Road. 

The kid's eyes are closed again, and Max reaches into the fundamentally-altered space of the Rig's cab and finds the curve of his skull, cups one rough hand against the skin. Runs his thumb over the ridge of an eyebrow. There is enough left of consciousness and will for the kid to turn his head a little, pushing against the touch with another of those small wordless noises, and with that, suddenly, subtly, the world once more changes its shape around Max.

"Gonna get you out of here," he repeats, and when the kid opens his improbable eyes and looks at him and _knows_ him, Max finds that against all logic, against all reason, his own face is pulling itself into something like a smile. 

~

That doesn't last, of course. It doesn't last after he pulls the wrecked door off and gets a closer look at the kid: at least one leg is broken, broken badly, and the sand underneath him is tarry-dark with lost blood. Even in the heat of the day Max can tell how much too warm his skin feels. The eyes are sunk deep in their smudged sockets, the scarred lips cracked and dry. 

To get him out Max has to find a long piece of wreckage and work it under the cab's frame, levering the structure up and incidentally releasing a whole new world of stink from what's left of Rictus Erectus. The broken leg is pinned, and he has to bend the metal away with a horrid rusty squall that sends the flies up in a cloud, and then steady Nux while he shakes and clenches with dry-heaves. He has no idea how much time has passed when he can finally haul the half-conscious kid over his shoulder and carry him back to the Jag. 

For the second time in recent memory Max uncurls the line of tubing from its strap on his shoulder, looks grimly at the large-bore needle before pushing it into his arm, watches his own blood snaking its way along the clear line. The kid's veins are a mess, lumpy and scarred from God knows how many transfusions, and he has to hunt before he can find a decent place to stick him, but eventually he has the connection made. 

Max soaks his own dust-scarf with water and wipes away sand and blood and filth from the kid's face, feeling his own blood running out of him again, wondering how much of it he has left, and if it matters. The water evaporates almost instantly in this thirsty air, cool enough to rouse his passenger: enough for those remarkable eyes to drift open, hazy and unfocused, but trying to track him, trying to see.

The kid -- _Nux_ , he reminds himself, _his name is Nux_ \-- rasps something, or tries to, and coughs instead, an unpleasant rusty sound. Max holds the canteen for him, tilting it enough to trickle a little water between his cracked lips, and is a little reassured to see him swallow and try again. 

"Did I..." he croaks, "'d I shh... _shine_."

"Yeah," Max says. "Yeah, you did. Shined like anything. Saved the day."

Nux's eyes drift closed again, but his scarred mouth curves a little in what Max thinks is a smile. There is still a little silver paint in the lines of scarring: it catches the light. "Furiosa's people are in charge at the Citadel," he says. "Take you back there. Get you fixed up."

"'M I awaited?"

"You are," he says, thinking of Capable, of the new lines on her face. "You just hang on."

Nux blinks at him, and at the dark-red tubing that connects them, and something more of recognition comes into his eyes. "...Blood...bag?" he says, heartbreakingly confused.

"Universal donor," says Max, and lights his engine.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing he is aware of is coolness. Coolness, and a vague sense of some vast, dim, enclosed space all around him. There is pain, somewhere a long way off, but it doesn't seem to matter. 

His immediate memory is dazzled and broken, a heap of razor-edged pieces of reflection that make no sense and hurt to look at too closely: he just knows there was an urgent need, a door he had thought locked to him reopening, a last clear chance to shine. 

And Capable. He remembers her face, drawing away from him with the rest of the world, remembers seeing her fingers close, her hand drawn to her chest. Remembers her _taking_ something, all he had to give, all he had ever had. 

_Witness me._

Nux lets the memory go again, and it fades back into the general sense of time that has passed, things that are over, and turns his face again into coolness and dark.

~

A confused series of moments, snags pulled out of the smooth fabric of darkness: movement near him, something touching his arms, his face, an arm round his shoulders lifting him upright. Something held to his mouth, bitter liquid, chokingly bitter, hard to swallow, and then water tasting clean and sweet and pure. The sound of voices, though he can't make out what they are saying. The pain is back, closer now, and he knows what it is that hurts: his leg

_twisted under him in the crushed cab of the Rig_

which he thinks is broken, though he's not sure why: he thinks he can remember it going _snap_ and the sudden bright vast drilling pain pulling color out of the world like water down a drain, pulling light away

_the sky and the desert, blue and gold, swinging dizzily across his vision, dwindling as time slowed, as time slowed and came to an end_

from everything; he thinks he can remember the spreading warmth of his own blood before he lost the thread entirely. Now the pain is awake, the pain is awake and hungry, the pain is dizzying, huge, sinking rusty teeth into the meat of his leg and he makes a noise that someone outside his own head can hear and the coolness is back again: cool hands, somebody's hands touching his face.

"It's okay," someone says, nearby. "It's okay, Nux."

He has to work hard to make his eyes open; they don't want to obey. But he forces the issue, and out of the dimness a paler oval shapes itself for him, a pale oval surrounded by blood-colored hair. Through the pain he can make out her eyes, the shape of her nose and chin, the way she moves as she leans a little closer.  


"What..." he says, a bit proud that he got that much of a question together. Someone else is there, someone he can't focus on; there's a flush of coldness in one arm that he recognizes as a dose of something shot into an IV. He's dizzy. The bed under him feels as if it's swaying like a pole in the wind. Capable cups her hand

_so cool, how is she so cool, she is like water in the wind, her skin is a heatsink_

against his cheek, traces the line of scarring with her thumb. He is reminded of another hand, large and rough and somehow gentle, reminded of leaning into that touch, without knowing why, and something in his throat seems to close, stinging his eyes with the promise of unexpected tears. 

"It's okay," she says again. "You're gonna be fine. Well..." and she seesaws her other hand in the air. "Fine-ish."

He starts the process of asking _what_ again, and apparently this is visible, because her mouth tightens and she shakes her head just a little: _don't_. "You rolled the War Rig," she says. "Blocked off the rest of them, let us get away. Furiosa's healing too. We've taken the Citadel, Nux, it's...it's going to take a while, but we'll make _this_ the Green Place for real."

"How'd...I get here?" he asks, with effort. Whatever they've given him is drifting like storm-sand over the pain, burying it under the first shallow veils of numbness: still there, waiting, but no longer wholly present.

"The crazy guy. He went and found you. We...should have."

Now her voice is bitter, bitter as black medicine in the half-swooning state of memory, and he thinks her mouth is only twisted like that because she is trying not to let it quiver. From somewhere a long way away he finds a forgotten thread of strength and makes his hand move, makes his arm take its terrible weight, lifting from his side in a wavery slow gesture that lets him touch her face the way she had once touched his. Her eyes are bright, too bright, even in the shifting shadows he can see that, and he wants to tell her not to cry: not to waste water in the desert. She closes them, hard, and when they open again the lashes are gathered in dark points. "Should have come back for you," she says. 

He lets his hand drift unsteadily over her face, her lips. Nux had never really understood that lips were soft, before; that revelation had been huge, immense, eclipsed only by the subsequent revelations that being held and holding someone gave you something like safety, something like a perimeter against the night. "No," he says. "You witnessed me. I saw you. Seeing me...very well." 

He wishes he could make his head work properly: everything's jumbled up, disconnected, firing randomly instead of in its proper sequence. He wants to say _that's all I ever needed, all I ever wanted, and you gave it to me, you gave it to me in taking what I had, the only thing I ever had to give. This...now...it doesn't matter if I'm in Valhalla, if Valhalla's real, it doesn't, nothing matters, because I did it, I lived, and I died, and everything afterward is extra, unexpected, bonus time._ Aloud he says "I shined. He told me...I shined."

"You did," says Capable, and covers his hand with hers, pressing his fingers to her cheek. He can feel her shaking, just a little. "And now you're gonna get well so you can do it some more."

He feels the scars around his mouth pull when he smiles. Whatever they'd given him was good shit: the world is fading out again. "Stay," he says--or asks: it's a question. He tries to find her face again, can make out only flesh-colored shadows. 

"I'm not going anywhere," she tells him, and he takes that with him, down into the black. 

~

This time when he wakes most of the confusion is gone, and along with the rotten-tooth pain of his broken leg he is aware of a whole host of other pains clamoring for his attention. 

He's lying in what must be one of the upper chambers of the Citadel, dim and cool, a faint breeze stirring the air. The IV in his arm is so familiar he barely notices it, but the person sitting beside the IV _is_ noticeable; is, in fact, Imperator Furiosa.

She looks old, older than he remembers her, and grey under the sun-beaten tan of her skin. There are patches of almost bruise-colored shadow beneath her eyes, and one still shows the colorful remnants of what must have been an astonishing shiner. And she's knitting. 

The left hand acts as a sort of clamp, holding the needle steady, keeping the stitches from slipping off one by one; the right hand is doing the complicated work. Nux stares; he must have made some sort of noise, because Furiosa finishes a stitch and looks up, meeting his eyes with that hard, familiar blue-gold gaze. 

They all knew that gaze. All the War Boys, all the Pups knew Imperator Furiosa. Some of the Imperators were cruel and some of them were cunning, and everybody knew whose way it was wise to stay out of--and who could be relied upon to give fair orders. Furiosa took zero shit from anyone, Furiosa brooked zero disobedience, but Furiosa also kept her promises. When Furiosa looked at you, some of them said, it was like she was looking right inside your head, right down inside the part of you what did the thinking, and if she gave you that little nod that meant _You did good_ , somehow that stuck with you for days afterward. 

Nux meets her eyes, feeling a chill draw his skin up into sudden goosebumps. Her eyes are just the same, even if her face is greyer and thinner around them, and the hard gold inside the blue makes him think again of the sky and the sand switching places as the Rig rolled and the world drew itself away from him. He looks into her eyes, and she nods, just a little, just once.

The relief, the sense of _acceptance_ , is so strong he feels dizzy again, and the chill shakes him all over like a badly balanced wheel. She frowns and pushes the knitting down her needles, setting it aside. He thinks disconnectedly that the way her mouth tightens is not so different from the way Capable's did, and is a little surprised. 

"It's okay," she says, as Capable had done, but with authority, and reaches to pull the covers a little further over him. They are white cloth, soft white without any road-grime: this is definitely the upper reaches of the Citadel, worlds away from the places he has known. "She's sleeping. She's not far away."

Still surprised--so surprised--Nux just blinks at her. "Capable," Furiosa clarifies. "Your girlfriend. She's been spending every free moment for a few days sitting right here."

"A...few days?" he manages at last, filing _girlfriend_ away for future stunned contemplation. "How long?"

"Call it a week," she says. "You were out of your head the first couple days, didn't recognize anybody, but you're on the mend."

"Oh," Nux says, and looks down at his arms, the knotted track-marks along the veins, the plastic IV tubing snaking down beneath a piece of surgical tape. It strikes him that perhaps now he is on borrowed time, time he has no control over, and the thought is frightening. 

"Hey," says Imperator Furiosa. "Nux."

He looks up again, the tangled, shattered pieces of his memory all clamoring at him at once: driving into the sandstorm, staggering after the Rig, watching the gun slip out of his reach, feeling Capable's fingers touching his face, kindness, the astonishing discovery of kindness; crawling out onto the hood with the nitro jerrycan, his mouth full of the electric taste of the stuff; finally behind the wheel, changing down for the last time, the femur-headed dagger socked into the shift knob still slick with this woman's blood. Watching them draw away, and wrenching the wheel with all his remaining strength, feeling the Rig first turn and then rear up into its vertiginous slow roll that swaps sky and sand and blackness. 

Furiosa fixes him with that hard, considering stare for a long time, while the memories flicker and snarl; and then she smiles, and he feels he has received something unearned. "You did good," she says. "You did a good job. Thank you."

His blood throbs in his gums, the back of his eyeballs, the hard swellings of his mates, his splinted and immobilized leg. There aren't any words for this, he's never had to think these things before, so he just says "You're welcome." 

She nods again. "Got someone else who wants a word with you, if you're feeling up to it. How bad's the leg?"

Nux has discovered he can wiggle the toes of that foot, which is reassuring, and he does it now, testing the pain. "Hurts," he says. "Less than it did."

"That's good. They'll be round in a little while to give you something for it."

"What...happened?" he asks her, because his head is clear enough now to comprehend the answer. Furiosa looks at him consideringly. 

"We got away, once you rolled the Rig. Those of us who survived got away. Drove back here with Joe's body on the hood. Once the people saw that, things...changed." 

She tells him, in her brief and factual sentences, what she recalls of that trip and what followed. He does not ask _what now_. He does not ask her to clarify anything; just looks down at his own hands, at his fingers, for a long moment. They are useful hands. They can do a number of useful tasks, and he is aware of this as an objective truth. They have been tools in one world, for one purpose, and now it seems there is a new world to take its place. 

Nux turns them over, watching his fingers tremble, and then looks up at Furiosa. There is something a little terrible about seeing her like this. There are a lot of terrible things. There are also, he is discovering, _wonderful_ things, and he is not sure how many are left to uncover, but he is one hundred percent committed to the task. 

"I got a question," he says, and her eyes seem to darken, as if expecting this. 

"Go ahead."

He points at the knitting she has set aside on the table by his bed, with a wobbly finger. "Can you," he says, and swallows hard, feeling the familiar pressure of Larry and Barry in his throat. "Can you teach _me_ how to do that?"

It turns out that he is the first of the War Boys ever, ever, ever to see Furiosa laugh.


	3. Chapter 3

There are always the same stages to go through, getting used to a new task. First the process of learning what is expected of you, and squashing the initial _I can't do this_ response. Then being very bad at it, and trying like hell to be bad at it only where you can't be seen, where nobody can remark on your failure; and then beginning to be capable, and not even noticing when _capable_ becomes _skilled_ becomes _expert_. Somewhere along the way muscles learn to accept their new assignments; skin that begins tender and blistered, rubbed raw with unaccustomed work, hardens and toughens into ridges of callus. Eventually it is difficult, if not impossible, to remember a time when you did _not_ know how to do the thing, when your body and mind were _not_ marked with the process of doing it.

Furiosa has thought lately--for she's had the questionable luxury of time _to_ think, since they took the Citadel and the world changed shape once more--that unlearning things has to work the same way. Or that, perhaps, learning and unlearning are two sides of one wheel. 

She had spent three days in the infirmary, after their return. The first day she'd slept a lot, and that was mostly due to whatever bitter thing they kept making her drink. After that, the time spent in unaccustomed quiet stillness had become unbearable very quickly; she felt the entire teeming anthill of the Citadel busily doing things all around her like a physical itch in her head. The second time she'd tried to get up and be useful despite the stab of pain in her side, they had threatened to have someone come and tie her to the damn bed, only half-joking.

"I'm fine," she had insisted, willing herself to _be_ fine. 

"You're not fine, and you're not gonna be unless you give yourself a chance to rest and heal. You did enough. That part of the journey's over. Give it a rest, let somebody else do some of the work for a change."

"I can't just lie here," she said, and it was true: every time she closed her eyes, she saw somebody else dying, somebody who was past help, past hope. The Keeper of the Seeds. The Valkyrie. All the others, over the years. All the ones for whom this day had come too late.

"No, you can't," said another voice, and Furiosa blinked, looking past the frustrated infirmarian to see one of the Vuvalini standing in the doorway, arms folded. "Course you can't. Do something useful, instead."

Furiosa watched as she came into the room, nudging people aside, and sat down on the edge of the bed. In her hands she held a ball of roughly-spun yarn and a couple of needles. 

"Might as well keep yourself occupied," the Vuvalini said. "You ever done any knitting in between driving War Rigs, our Furiosa?"

"No," she said, but the sense of miserable frustration was beginning to fade behind a sense of fascination. "I can't." Her good left arm was somewhere out in the desert; the spare was about equal to what she needed to use it for, not delicate work, and anyway it was hanging on a chair across the room.

"Bollocks you can't. Now look. Watch what I'm doing." 

Despite herself Furiosa had watched, sitting up a bit more to get a better angle, barely noticing the pain in her side; and when the Vuvalini fetched her second-best arm for her she pulled it on and tightened the straps almost eagerly. It was difficult to get her left hand to manage the grip strength she needed, and the thought of actually upgrading the hand and arm--trying to make it better instead of just living with it--felt strange and new in her head. 

The Vuvalini sat with her for what must have been a couple of hours, easily, and when she finally left Furiosa was intently working on a row of stitches--rough, uneven, the tension all over the place, but stitches nonetheless: making a thing, rather than unmaking it. 

That afternoon the whole Citadel had rung with the news that the madman Max had returned with not the body of the heroic War Boy but the living, if damaged, War Boy himself; and Furiosa had dropped stitches and cursed and demanded that somebody bring her some damn oil for the hand's hinges and not realized at all that she was smiling.

The smiling: that's one of the things she is having to learn to do. It feels strange, pulling muscles in her face she isn't used to using much, but it's also beyond her control. Being in a world where it's a thing she is called upon to do more often than shooting somebody, or setting fire to them, is still so new it's giving her blisters. But she knows, she does know, that the blister stage doesn't last. 

Now, Nux is looking up at her with those astonishingly blue eyes, wide and bright, and the laugh comes without her meaning it to. "Yeah," she says, picking up the knitting needles. "I'm still learning myself, but I can teach you, blackthumb. We can work on it together."

She doesn't have a lot of basis for comparison, but Furiosa thinks the smile he gives her has got to be one of the most _hopeful_ expressions she has ever seen.

~

Max doesn't think he's ever seen her laugh before, either, or heard it. It's a startling sound, somehow bright in the dimness of this warren of interconnected caverns, and it sends him searching for images that are beyond him, images from a previous reality, before the world moved on.

He's standing in the shadow of the doorway, watching her bend over Nux, saying something he can't hear; her mismatched hands are cupped around his. He is reminded a little of how she had looked at the sleeping Wives once or twice over her shoulder, driving through the night. Then, as now, he'd been aware of a sense of trespass, of witnessing something that wasn't his to see; and he turns away, back to the hollowed-out hallway, and leans against the wall with his eyes closed.

Since he'd brought Nux back to the Citadel eight days before, he hasn't gone far. At first he'd been sick himself, heat-stunned and weakened by yet another diminution of his storied high-octane crazyblood: he can't quite remember pulling the mutant Jag up to the rock-cut portal, or hauling the kid out and carrying him inside. There's a sort of vague unpleasant smudge in his memory between driving back through the desert and finding himself lying in a room not unlike the one where Nux now lies, with a tube still plugged into his arm. He'd stared at the clear line snaking down to the needle for an embarrassingly long time before realizing that it was dripping fluids _into_ him, not taking out his blood: that this was a thing that could happen. 

He doesn't hear Furiosa approach, doesn't look up until she says "Hey." She's standing in the hallway, watching him with one of her unreadable expressions. "He wants to see you."

She's still too pale under the tan, her fading bruises still visible, but Max thinks she looks a thousand times better than she had when they returned with what was left of Joe: thinks, in fact, that she looks better than she had during their journey. It's something in her eyes, the way she moves, as if some unbalanced load has been redistributed, some invisible but terribly heavy weight has been removed. 

"How is he?" Max asks, straightening up.

Furiosa shrugs a little, now, looking over her shoulder at the rock-cut chamber she's just left. "Hurting," she says. "Leg's broken in a couple places, it's gonna be a long time before he can drive again. Probably need a brace."

"What about..." Max waves a brusque hand at his own neck. What about the tumors, the sickness, what about the things that are comprehensively _wrong_ with Nux. 

When he'd first been hung up as a blood-bag, he'd thought--through the rage, through the humiliation, through the red fog of desperation--that the scarred-up, etiolated kid on the other end of the line couldn't have long to live. Nux's subsequent vitality had surprised him. Nux's survival of the wreck was...nothing short of miraculous. 

_He's just a boy,_ Angharad had said. _Just a boy at the end of his half-life_. 

Max thinks that the initial crash, the sandstorm, wounds, dehydration, the battle--battles plural, although in his head it's all sort of blurred together into one long adrenaline-fueled balls-out struggle-- _and_ the rollover must have cost at least half of anybody's life. Half of his own, maybe, although he stopped keeping count of that long ago. Half a life. Half a _half_ -life left a quarter. How the hell is the kid still breathing?

Unless there was something else going on. Something else the Immortan had lied about. 

"His fever's coming down, for now," Furiosa is saying, cutting through Max's thoughts. "He's mending."

 _How,_ he thinks again. _Kami-crazy War Boys, devoting their half-lives on earth to Immortan Joe, that he should carry them victorious in death through the gates of Valhalla to ride eternal with the warriors of legend, shiny and chrome._ How do you _mend_ , how do you heal, when even that's been taken away?

Max knows firsthand that when you have nothing more to lose, when there is nothing left to protect but yourself, the world simplifies itself down to a sharp single point; but where his own existence has shaped itself around _survival_ , theirs had been the opposite: their only instinct had been glorious death. 

The edges of an idea, of a question, are beginning to solidify. So far he can only feel the edges, not the whole of the thing.

"Max? Hey. Hey. _Max_."

He realizes Furiosa is snapping her fingers at him, and shakes his head in the instinctive clearing gesture that usually makes his mind stop playing tricks. "Huh?"

"You okay?" she asks. "You're zoning out."

"I'm fine," he says. "Tell me, the War Boys...what did they die of?"

Furiosa looks at him, one eyebrow raised. "War," she says. "Bullets. Fire. You don't remember that part?"

"No, I mean...in general. What killed them. Other than fighting for Joe."

"They got used up," she says flatly, face bleak. "Worn out. Those who could be fixed, the Mechanic fixed, but...there's a point where replacement is cheaper than repair. In the end mostly it's the fever that gets them, if they hang around long enough."

"What about him?" 

"I don't know. I wouldn't have expected him to make it through the rollover, or the shock, but." She shrugs, with a creak of leather. "Healing's not my job. I don't know how it works."

"Me either," he says. What little he does know is basic field-medic shit, like the emergent decompression job he'd done on her, the blood transfusion: the equivalent of emergency roadside repair. This is more like the challenge of restoring a near-totaled wreck. Max rubs at the back of his head, wincing as half-healed cuts and scrapes protest. "But he's hanging on, so far?"

"Hanging on. Awake and talking, even making a little bit of sense every now and then. Like I said, he asked for you."

"Why?"

"Gonna have to ask him that, but I'm betting it might have something to do with you going to rescue him from the canyon, when everyone else gave him up for dead. --How'd you know, anyway?" she asks. "How did you know to go look for him?"

It's his turn to shrug. "I didn't," he says. "Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess I wanted to...I dunno, witness him. Mark what he did. Last stop before I headed out into the world."

"I'm glad you did," Furiosa tells him. "I'm glad you came back."

He looks at her, meets her eyes, looking steadily back at him. The moment in the salt-flats comes back with that dizzying sensation of crosspatched memory: holding out his hand, feeling the shape of the future drawing itself down to a single point resting in the cup of his outstretched palm, feeling time spinning out, slowing, pausing, and then coming back in a rush as she made her decision and swung her hand in to grip his. _I see you very well_ , her eyes had said, over their clasped hands. _I see you, seeing me._ That same recognition and acknowledgment is in her face now, and he knows it's mirrored in his own. 

"Me too," he says, and the connection is broken, over, but part of his mind is still a little shaken by the strength of it. 

"Go on," she says. "Don't keep him waiting."

He nods, and watches her go, before turning back to the door of the room where Nux lies. The kid is sitting up in bed, the line of his IV catching the light as he holds something up in both hands to peer at it with an oddly endearing sort of intensity. 

Max watches for a moment, not wanting to disturb him, but just then Nux's thin shoulders suddenly convulse with a fit of coughing. It's a nasty sound, a painful sound, and Max is back on the Rig again scrambling out of the cab's roof, down to the hood where the kid is crouched by the blower intakes, coughing violently, clutching the nitro can: in the memory he cups a hand to Nux's head. _Go_ , he says, taking his place: _I got it_. In the present, he stops leaning in the doorway and hurries over to the bed.

They've given Nux a bath, at least: the road-grime and the last of the silver paint are gone, but Max realizes that the War Boys' paint and powder weren't entirely responsible for the kid's pallor or the shadows lining his eyesockets. He bends over, rests a hand between Nux's shoulderblades, noticing how much cooler his skin feels now; he's glad for it, even as he wants to know what's really going on. 

Nux is still coughing, but he looks up with streaming eyes and tries to smile, tries to say something. Max can feel the knobbles of his spine much too clearly as he rubs his back. "It's okay," he says. "C'mon, breathe."

Little by little Nux gets it under control, wheezes deepening into proper breathing. He leans against Max with his eyes closed, and that feeling of memory crosspatching, of time wrinkling up on itself, is very strong. There's a cup of water on the table by the bed, and Max reaches over, hands it to the kid; he takes it in both hands, shaking, and drinks deeply. When he opens his eyes again, they're clear: that uncertain feverish brilliance Max remembers from the wrecked Rig is gone. "Thanks," he rasps. 

"'S okay. You want I should get somebody?"

Nux shakes his head. "'m fine," he says, still breathless, and rubs at the two swellings at the left side of his throat. Somebody has drawn the little smiley faces back on them, Max notices. "I always got a bit of a cough. But you came back, Bloodbag. You came back for me." The eyes are very big and very blue. 

"Yeah," Max says. "Yeah, I did."

"Why?"

He wishes he had some decent kind of answer. "Just did," he says. "Nobody knew you'd made it, or they would've gone back to get you right away. Furiosa was hurt real bad, and...we thought you were dead, kid. Everyone thought you were dead."

Nux nods. "So did I," he says, still leaning against Max's shoulder. "Pretty sure I was. Don't remember much, just...it was hot, 'n everything hurt, but I figured that's cause I didn't get into Valhalla, I must be in the other place."

The matter-of-fact tone seems to be making something in Max's chest hurt, for no logical reason. "Could be you're not ready for Valhalla yet. Got stuff here you still need to do."

"Like what?"

"I dunno. Everyone's...figuring out how to run things now that Joe's gone. You're part of that too, you're a good mechanic, you can definitely be of use."

Nux looks up at him. "What are you gonna do?"

"Dunno," he says again. "I'll figure something out."

"You should stay."

And just like that he recognizes that weird unfamiliar discomfort in his chest: it's not any of his own half-healed wounds bothering him, it's a feeling from the time _before_ , from the previous world. A feeling that had died a long time ago, died with the people it had once concerned. 

_Where are you, Max?_

_Where are you?_

His immediate instinct is to run like hell, but Nux is looking up at him with an expression he can't bring himself to break. _Can't afford this_ , he thinks to himself, _you know you can't afford this, this is exactly what you do not need, you need to go, you need to leave now before it gets any worse and you_ know _that_.

That's his own voice: but the other voice in his head, the one he's not sure he recognizes now, pipes up with one word: _Redemption_.

_No such thing, shut up, I lied, I lied to Furiosa, there is never going to be any redemption--_

_Wasn't ever going to be any hope either, was there? Hope was a mistake. And now look._ The voice is dry, at the end of its patience. _Look at this kid who should be dead a few times over. Look at him seeing you with those bright open eyes: seeing you very well._

Nux's upturned face has taken on a puzzled, slightly anxious expression. "What is it?" he asks. 

_Where are you, Max?_

_I don't know, I can't do this, leave me alone--_

_(can nobody tell me)_  
_(tell you what)_  
_(where in the world i am)_  
_(not easily...not easily)_

_Where are you?_

Out loud he hears himself say "Max. My name's not Bloodbag. It's Max."

The worried look vanishes completely behind the biggest brightest smile he's seen in a very long time, and he realizes that his chance to escape is now gone, is over, because he isn't going to be able to un-see that smile in a hundred thousand days and nights of driving: he could cross half the damn world and still have that smile with him, still caught firmly in the dark meat of his head like a hooked needle. _Damn it_ , he thinks tiredly, but part of him feels paradoxically somehow relieved. 

"Max," Nux is saying. "Max is a good name."

A great many of the people who know it are dead. Max is trying not to think about that when Nux starts to cough again, and he's almost glad of the distraction as he has to steady him through it. This time the fit doesn't last as long, but Max still doesn't like the way it sounds, heavy and difficult, or how hard it shakes him. 

"You sure you don't want me to get someone?" he asks when it's over, and Nux shakes his head, but Max can feel him shivering. He looks around for extra blankets, something to tuck round the kid's shoulders: nothing. With a sigh, he shrugs out of his battered jacket and drapes it around Nux, careful of the IV tube, wondering exactly what's dripping through it. Wondering a lot of things.

_(where are you)_

The business with his jacket results in another astonished, wide-eyed look, and Max is absolutely no good at all at dealing with that expression and rapidly running out of ability to cope, so he looks around for something, anything else to think about. He says abruptly "What're you workin' on?"

Successfully distracted, Nux looks down at his lap and picks up the...okay, those really _are_ knitting needles, Max realizes, and boggles slightly. 

"Oh shit," Nux says, dismayed. "I dropped a stitch."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Illustrated by the fantastic [spockandawe](http://spockandawe.tumblr.com/).

This would be so much easier, Nux thinks, if it was metal. 

Well, no, okay, he admits to himself that it would be dead tricky to bend even really fine wire back and forth so many times and tie it in knots: metal doesn't like that, it can't take the bending, it goes all hard and cracky. But he _knows_ metal, he knows its ways, knows what its turning colors mean, knows how to cut it and to join it with the tuned point of a torch-flame: it talks to him in a language he understands. He's _good_ with metal, like he's good behind the wheel. This stuff is weird and twisty and wants to unwind and slip off the needles and it stretches a bit, enough to make you think there's still some give, and then refuses to stretch any further just when you need it to. It's soft but strong. He isn't used to that.

Technically the task isn't challenging. You have a loop on one needle and you stick the other needle through that loop--and that's another thing, metal doesn't untwist itself and let you poke right through it without meaning to--and then you wind the yarn around the tip of the second needle and kind of pull this new loop of yarn back through. That part's difficult when the loops are too tight, but he's afraid that if he lets the yarn stay loose the whole mess will slip off the end of the needle. 

Still, he's got several inches done so far. After Max had gone-- _Max, what a good name_ , he thinks, _it'd look just right welded on a go-pedal, I should do that when they let me outta here_ \--he had been amazingly tired, ridiculously tired, and his leg had quit grumbling at him and moved on to yelling: it felt kind of like there was broken glass in there, instead of bone. Nux hadn't argued when the infirmary people came and took the knitting away and told him he had to rest; he would have agreed to just about anything in return for the cold stuff they shot into his IV to make his leg shut up. He'd slept, waking hours later, not really able to tell time but feeling as if it was evening, and found a note by the bed.

_Took mine back, but here's your own. Make something new._

It was signed _F_ , and sitting beside it was a new ball of yarn and a pair of needles which Nux immediately identified as spokes from a wire wheel with their tips ground into smooth points. 

So he'd started again. There's maybe four inches of uneven garter stitch done by the time Capable comes in with a tray. Nux isn't good at expressions, but he can tell she's both glad and a little surprised to see him awake and busy.

She comes over and sets the tray down, and he makes a little incoherent noise when she takes his face between her hands and kisses him. Warmth floods his head, momentarily dizzying. 

"...What's that for?" he asks, when she sits back, unaware of the huge silly grin he's sporting. Capable laughs. 

"Doesn't have to be _for_ anything, War Boy," she says. "How're you feeling?"

"Good," Nux says, and it's true. "I mean, ow, but that's not news." The dope is still hanging on enough to obscure the pain, not erase it, and anyway he's pretty okay with pain in general. It's a thing that happens. It doesn't even occur to him to mention the cough. "Anyway, look! Look what I did."

He shows her the knitting. Capable's mouth (which is a very lovely mouth, Nux thinks, the sharp arches of her upper lip go really well with her full lower lip, he's never noticed that sort of thing before on anybody) curves in a wonderful smile. "I'm gonna make things," he tells her. It's kind of an exciting thought: the ability to make things out of something other than metal, things people can _wear_ , or use to carry stuff.

"I know. You already are, I'm proud of you, Nux," she says, and for a moment he thinks he can hear the edges of tears in her voice, but it's only for a moment. Then he realizes what she's just said, and his eyes go wide. 

"You are?"

"Well, _yeah_ ," she says. "Course I am. You're impressive, you know that?"

"I am?"

" _Yes_ ," Capable says. "I mean, you're a driver. That's not something they just handed out, right? You had to be pretty good to get your own wheel, your own car. But you're not _just_ a driver, you can fix stuff, you can fix engines on a moving rig in the middle of a battle, remember that? Fixing stuff is harder than breaking it." 

He's never thought of it quite like that: everybody's expected to be able to do repair work, but only the select few got the privilege of worshiping V8 behind a wheel of their own. He'd been so proud of himself when he finally attained that rank, when he got his own car, when he welded the letters of his name into the metal to make it real, irrevocable, undeniably true. To think that the _wrench_ rather than the _wheel_ represents achievement is...new. It's a little dizzying seeing the world from the opposite angle, even in snatches and flutters like this.

She looks at him, serious now. "Like the difference between seeds and bullets. Anyone can kill somebody. Making something new, or repairing what's been broken, that's _hard,_ but that's worthwhile. Not to mention the whole, you know, saving everybody's lives thing. And now you can do this, too. Of course I'm proud of you."

"Oh," Nux says, and blinks a couple of times, and then wakes up the pain in his leg by pushing himself a little further upright, enough to cup his hand to her face and draw her down into a kiss. 

In the black heat of the cab, when he'd been sure he was dead, Nux had wished so much that he'd kissed her again before the end. That he'd closed the distance between them in that last moment when it was still possible, when their eyes had met, and kissed her. That he could have taken that with him down into the dark. The wasted opportunity was bitter, in that hot place that was not Valhalla, bitter as ashes. Now, awake and aware, he is resolved not to miss any more opportunities. 

Capable kisses him back, firmly and enthusiastically; and when she does pull back she is flushed and bright-eyed. "You _must_ be feeling better."

He nods, even though the excited pounding of his heart is shaking up the stuff in his chest: Nux ignores it with the ease of long practice. "Feel shiny," he says. _I never thought I'd do anything so shine_ , he'd told her in the beginning, and the idea that maybe he _has_ done some pretty damn bright things since then begins to feel like it might fit into his head. 

Nux's awareness has divided itself into two distinct, discrete periods: the reality of _before_ , the world he'd known in the caves, where he'd fought his way up the ranks with both hands and his teeth and hung on to it, hung on to it the way he'd hung on to his wheel when Slit tried to promote himself, and the reality of _after_ , where the rules have changed and the godhead has been torn apart. The measures by which achievement is reckoned in the _after_ have changed as well, and he's not sure quite where any of them stand.

But he'll hang on, nonetheless. He's good at hanging on. 

"Good," Capable is saying. "Here, I brought you dinner, you gotta eat. Get your strength back." 

He isn't really hungry--he's never really hungry--but he just nods. What she's brought turns out to be some kind of clear soup and bread that isn't hard and stale and lacks green furry patches, and Nux surprises himself by finishing it all. 

Afterward Capable sets the tray aside and tells him to move over, and Nux shivers with pleasure as she settles on the bed beside him. It's still so new to him that he hesitates a moment before putting his arm around her; but she smiles and wriggles closer, resting her head against his shoulder, tracing the lines of the engine block on his chest with a fingertip. 

He nuzzles her hair, breathing in the warm clean scent of her--completely unlike the way he's used to people smelling, a rank gamy mixture of sweat and oil--and closes his eyes for a moment. The light touch of her finger running over the raised lines fills his entire awareness. When she shifts a little, breaking the spell, Nux has no idea how much time has passed. 

"Show me," Capable says, and at first he has no idea what she's talking about. He opens his eyes, blinks down at her. 

"That," she says, pointing at the yarn and needles on the table by the bed. "Show me." 

"I'm not good at it," he says, but reaches over to grab the knitting nonetheless. 

"I don't care, I want to see. I like watching you work."

"Oh," he says, unable to stop himself grinning hugely, and despite the tightness of his chest and the ever-present pain of his leg he thinks he has seldom been so glad to be alive. 

 

~

 

"Okay," Max says, setting down his plate with a thump. 

Furiosa looks up from the table. The refectory is busy, people moving with a purpose, not dawdling over their meals; as soon as one diner gets up from the long communal tables, another takes their place. It's noisy with the mingled gabble of a bunch of people talking at once, the equivalent of background road-noise. Useful for covering up private conversations. 

"Okay what?" she asks. He sits down beside her. The dressing on his left hand is new, freshly applied. 

"Tell me about the War Boys."

Furiosa gives him a considering look. "Everything about the War Boys," he adds. 

"Why?"

"I--" He shakes his head. Even if he could string the words together efficiently enough to explain, he's not entirely clear himself. _Because I think there's more to what Joe did. Because I think the lie is bigger than we realized._

That's from _ago_ , too, that idea, it's from the previous iteration of the world. _If you want to distract someone from the bitter truth, you tell the Big Lie._ He remembers that, remembers the saying. Make the lie big enough, and nobody will want to believe it's not true. 

Furiosa is looking at him again, her mouth tight. She knows him well enough now that maybe she's gotten used to the fact that he trails off sometimes, stuck in neutral, his gears not making contact, but he knows _her_ well enough to be aware that her patience has hard limits. He retraces the path that had got him stuck this time. 

"I'm not sure," he says, finally. "But whatever you're making here, whatever kind of future you're building, they're part of it."

"Until they run out of time," Furiosa says. 

"Mm." He pokes at his forgotten dinner-plate. "Well. Until any of us run out of time."

Furiosa is silent, and after a moment he looks up to find her smiling a little. "What?"

"'Us'," she says. "You said _any of us_. So you are staying."

Max shrugs, but her smile sinks in; her smile sinks in hard, joining the fresh and vivid memory of the way the kid had smiled when Max told him his name. "Yeah," he says, and scrubs his hands over his face. "Yeah, I'm staying."

"Good," she says, and thumps his shoulder, gently. "We can use you."

He thinks possibly that this is what he's wanted, on some level. That underneath the immediate survival instinct that has driven him pretty much singlehandedly over the past who-knows-how-long, beyond the mindless urge to flee from the voices he carries in his own head, the idea of having a purpose has always haunted him. Having a use. 

_I need you here_ , Furiosa had said. _You may have to drive the Rig,_ and just like that, the red clamor in his head had backed off, the resistance of some vast circuit suddenly dropping, letting thoughts connect and flow. 

_Where are you, Max?_

It's faint now, still there but faint and far away. _I'm here_ , he tells the voice, and out loud: "I'm here." It's affirmation; it's acknowledgment. They can use him: he is here. 

"Now that we got that straight," Furiosa says, with actual humor in her voice, "you better eat quick, someone's probably waiting for your spot at the table. And if you want to know about the War Boys, I'll tell you what I know, but you could talk to Corpus Colossus. There's no guarantee he'll talk _back_ , but you can try."

"He's alive?" says Max, with his mouth full. 

"Yup. Under guard--mostly for his own safety, a lot of people want him to follow in his dad's footsteps--and he's not chatty." Furiosa shrugs. "But he knows everything about this place. Rictus was the muscle, but Corpus is the brain."

Max considers this, and swallows. "Where is he?"

"In the vault," she says. "Safest place in the Citadel, at least in some respects. Finish up and I'll take you there."


	5. Chapter 5

Max realizes he's seen this place from the outside. 

The round door--a foot thick, held firmly in place with radial bolts the width of his wrist--opens on a wide and airy space, cool with the soft sound of trickling water, lit by a ceiling made up almost entirely of clear glass. He remembers looking at these glass domes at the top of the sheer rock cliff, and wondering how they were put there, and to what purpose. 

Furiosa stands aside to let him through into the vault, her face hard. He ducks through the steel-lined opening, straightens up, looking around. There is what appears to be an actual piano, bookshelves, comfortable furniture. There are beds, visible through another door. And there are words. 

_WE ARE NOT THINGS_ , one wall proclaims. _OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARLORDS_ is scrawled on the floor. 

_Who killed the world?_ Max thinks, with another of those dizzy flickers of crosspatched memory. _You let us die. You let everybody die._

"You okay?" Furiosa asks, and he shakes his head to clear it, squeezing his eyes shut: when he opens them everything is back to normal. 

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah. This is...where he kept them?"

"His greatest treasures," Furiosa says, voice slick with acid. "I was assigned to guard them. Might once have _been_ one of them, but I got unlucky. Or lucky as hell, depending on how you look at it."

Max looks at her, at the arm, the cropped hair, and tries to picture her in flowing filmy gauze. It doesn't work. "When he took you," he says. "Seven thousand days is what, nineteen years? You would have been ten, eleven, something like that."

"Let's not do this right now," she says, evenly, and nods to the far side of the chamber. Max hadn't even noticed the presence of the diminutive hammock-sling hanging by the glass wall. A telescope on a tripod stands nearby. There is a battered green oxygen tank standing beside it, a narrow plastic line running from the hammock's occupant to the regulator on the tank. "Like I said, he's not chatty, but you might be able to get some information out of him. When you're done, just bang on the door and the guard will let you out."

_Seven thousand days_ , Max thinks. The awareness of so much time not passed but _endured_ makes him feel briefly dizzy again. "Okay," he says. "Thank you."

"I don't think you're gonna like what you hear," says Furiosa abruptly. "You don't have to do this."

"Yeah," he says, and scrubs his hands down his face. "I do."

She gives him one of those hard blue-gold stares that Max can't help but think of as a searchlight looking right through his eyeballs at what's written on the inside of his skull, and then just nods once, turning to leave him alone with Immortan Joe's surviving child and a hell of a lot of questions. 

Corpus Colossus has what's possibly the best view in the Citadel, Max thinks, coming over to the window where he's hanging. The only better view would be from the gardens at the top of the cliffs, a couple hundred feet higher up. From here, the huge open space between the two monoliths looks small and insignificant, the tiny figures of people nothing more than specks. He's reminded of the horrible vertiginous moment when he'd leapt out into space, reaching for the hook, not sure if he'd catch hold or go plummeting to the dusty gathering-ground far below, and instinctively reaches out to touch the leading between windowpanes: reminding himself he isn't going to fall. 

Corpus twists to look up at him, hanging in the hammock like an overgrown doll, and favors Max with one of the world's all-time greatest withering looks. Deliberately, he turns away again, returning his attention to the world outside. 

Max has been withered by champions, and doesn't respond to the implicit dismissal, staying where he is, looking down to the bustle and flow of the evolving Citadel. The telescope is aimed not at the activity below but at something beyond, and he's curious. "May I?"

Corpus gives him another expressive _fuck off_ look, which he takes as a yes. Bending down a little, Max peers through the eyepiece, and is not entirely surprised to find he can just about make out a familiar tangle of metal, the curve of an overturned tanker, a mountain of wrecked speaker-stacks. The wreck. 

"Did you see it?" he says. 

"Fuck off," Corpus says out loud this time, wheezing. "Go away, bloodbag."

"You must've seen it." He looks again through the scope: drifting sand has already blurred the edges of the wreckage, entombed the bodies in a drying scouring landscape. Another month, and even this high-powered telescope won't be able to make out anything but sand. "Can see forever from up here."

"I said _fuck off_ ," Corpus snarls. "You deaf as well as stupid?"

"I'll fuck off," he says, "when I get what I came for. You know everything about this place. Tell me about the War Boys."

Corpus squints up at him. "The hell you want to know about them for, bloodbag? I don't have to talk to you."

"No," Max agrees. "You don't." He doesn't move. "Kind of surprised you're still alive, to be honest."

"Oh, that's it, is it? Going to threaten me? Big scary bloodbag like you?"

"I'm not threatening. I'm curious. How come you're still here?"

"Ask _Furiosa_ ," Corpus says. "She's the one had 'em haul me up here, set me up all nice and pretty so's I can watch what she does to the place. Won't let nobody in here but her 'n her crew. I knew she was trouble. I warned Dad years ago but he didn't listen."

"Yeah?" Max says, casually. 

"Too right. Never trusted her, Dad shouldn't've put her in charge of the Wives in the first place."

"Thinks too much?"

"Yeah. Mistake lettin' em have Miss Giddy, too," Corpus goes on. "Start lettin' em learn things, sooner or later they're gonna start askin' _questions_ , and that never ends well. Dad never understood that. Thought he was bein' kind to them, treatin' his property like they deserved it."

"They're young," Max says. "The wives, I mean. He go through them pretty fast, or what?"

"Three chances." Corpus holds up his hand, three fingers extended. "They don't catch pregnant, or they lose the baby, or they have it and it ain't right, they're gone. This lot's pretty new."

"'Ain't right'," Max repeats. 

"Yeah. After Rictus and me, Dad didn't want any more surprises. Wanted _threaded stock_." His voice drips acid. "Only the best pedigree for the son and heir of the Immortan. Went through a lotta wives over the years. Seems like maybe it ain't the _girls_ that weren't right. Seems like maybe it's Dad havin' the trouble. Doesn't matter now, anyway." He reaches down to the regulator on the oxygen tank, opens it a little further; Max can hear the faint hiss of the gas from the nasal cannula even over Corpus's noisy breathing. "What do you _want_ , bloodbag?"

"Information," he says. 

"You won't get it."

Max shrugs. He can tell this is infuriating Corpus. "Make you a deal," he says, and waves a hand at the desert. "You tell me what I need to know, and I'll see to it that your brother out there gets a decent burial." _What's left of him_ , he doesn't add. 

Corpus twists sharply to look up at him. "Why?"

He shrugs again. Corpus stares at him, hard, for a long time, and it's a challenge even for Max to bear that gaze without letting his face register an expression. He's about to lose the contest when Corpus just sighs, rattly and unhealthy-sounding, and leans back in his hammock-sling. "Fine," he says. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything," Max says, and then has to shake his head. "Start with the War Boys. Where do they come from?"

"Below. The Wretched. They'd offer up their kiddies, hopin' to get em on the platform every time it came down, hopin' they'd get picked to enter the Citadel." 

He talks about the ceremonies: taking away the children's names, inducting them into the worship of V8, bestowing their new identities as War Pups. "They learn mechanics from the older kids, repairing and building. If they live to be War Boys, they learn to drive."

Along the way they learn to worship and to venerate all things automotive; draw pistons, carburetors, whole engine-blocks on their skin with the edge of a knife; tattoo themselves with oil. Along the way they learn that they are born to die; that their time is short, but not without purpose. They learn to hold chrome sacred because of its sheer bright rarity in a rust-and-primer world. They learn that they are awaited in Valhalla, where only the bravest and truest of warriors ride eternal in chariots of blinding brilliance. They learn a lot of things, it turns out. 

"Go back a bit," Max says. "They live here, in the Citadel."

"Yeah. Why?"

"But the other people living here--the people who _aren't_ War Boys--when do they get told they aren't going to live that long?"

Corpus narrows his eyes. "I don't get you, bloodbag."

"I think you do," he says. "What exactly is it that the War Boys die of? If it's radiation, if there's something in this place that poisons them, how come everybody else isn't affected?"

"Everybody _is_ ," Corpus says, sourly. "You might've noticed nobody round here's what you could call exactly _well_."

"But they aren't all terminal. Are they."

Corpus's eyes dart to the side, back up at him. Max is good at spotting tells, but no skill whatsoever is needed to detect this one. "Does it matter?" he asks after a little too long. 

"I think it does," Max says. "Killing themselves for the glory of your dad is one thing, if they had a choice between that and dying slow of some terrible sickness. Killing themselves for the glory of your dad because he made them _think_ they had no other options, that's a bit different."

Corpus fidgets. "So what?"

"So that's something I think they deserve to know."

"Don't see why," Corpus mutters, but then he sighs again, wheezing. "Fine. You're mostly wrong, anyway. They ain't all terminal, but a lot of 'em _are_ \--from infections, bad nutrition, no sunlight, that kind of thing." He pauses. "It ain't the air in here. It's what they eat and drink."

Max stares at him. 

"Dad puts...used to put...somethin' in their food, or water, I don't know which. Not much of it, but after a couple years it'd start to build up, make 'em vulnerable to infections. Make 'em think they didn't have much time left. There was always more coming, no shortage of War Pups to take their place."

Max does a bit more staring. 

"It's a fuckin' death cult," Corpus snaps. "You knew that already."

"He kept his own people sick to make them think they were dying," Max says.

"Only a little bit," Corpus says, and looks away. "Yes. Yes, okay? That's what Dad did. Quit staring at me."

Max drums his fingers on the telescope. "Who else knows about this?"

"How should I know? Everybody who used to run the Citadel is probably dead."

"Can we do anything to fix them?"

Corpus shrugs. "Maybe. Medicine ain't exactly an advanced discipline out here. Organic Mechanic was in charge of doctorin' the War Boys."

Organic Mechanic isn't going to be much help, Max thinks. He watches Corpus closely, and when the little dark eyes flicker toward the horizon again he notices. "Why do you care, anyway?" Corpus asks. "Why do you give a fuck what happens to the War Boys? They would've killed you."

"Came pretty close a couple times," he agrees. "What's out there?"

Again, the little badly-concealed flicker. "What's out where?"

Max doesn't answer: he can wait. Corpus fiddles with the telescope's eyepiece, irritably, uneasily. "It's a myth," he says, after a little while, not looking up at Max. 

"What is?"

"Another place. Out there, a long way off, past Bartertown. There's stories of another place with people, another settlement."

"Bartertown?" Max repeats, but the word is familiar. 

"That's Aunty Entity's territory. Trading post. Runs on pigshit, or so I hear tell. Beyond that, further beyond, there's supposed to be the big water--the ocean--and what used to be a city, and people still live there. Now and then we catch someone coming from that direction." Corpus adjusts the scope's focus minutely. "The stories all say there's buildings with mirror-glass on them and the people live underground with electric light. They know all the forgotten things from the last world. That's where you'd find a doctor, bloodbag. That's where they have the knowin' of the medicine. But it's a myth. It's just a story."

Sometimes stories are true, Max thinks, listening to the words echo in his head. Beside him Corpus looks up from the telescope. "I talked too long," he says. "My throat hurts. Get me some water, bloodbag, and fuck off."

Max straightens up with a nod. He finds a cup--no, an actual glass, this really is the lap of luxury--and brings Corpus his water. "Thanks," he says. "For telling me."

Corpus glares at him, but says nothing. 

"I won't forget," Max adds. 

"Forget what?"

"Rictus," he says, and nods to the distant sunglint from the wreck out in the desert. "We made a deal." 

Corpus is still staring at him as he turns and crosses the chamber to bang on the vault's door; still staring as it slowly swings open and Max ducks out into the world outside; still staring as the door closes once more on the rarefied atmosphere of the Citadel's most luxurious prison cell.


	6. Chapter 6

None of them were used to the sun. 

Before Joe, in their first lives, they had been free to walk under the open sky; but as the years passed in the Citadel each of them, one by one, had forgotten what it was like. Out in the desert, with Furiosa, the sun had hit them like a hammer, like a physical force. 

Nobody had had time to care very much about that, busy trying not to die. Now, Capable watches Cheedo and the Dag move among the green shoots in the garden terrace under the shade of wide-brimmed hats, their loose wide-sleeved shifts keeping the sun off arms and shoulders. They'd found out quite quickly how fast the light bit into exposed skin.

They'd all burned. Dag was the worst, physically sick with it, her pale skin first glowing hot and angry pink and then coming up in scores of clear blisters. After that they'd worn head-coverings to work in the gardens, and built a long awning to shade some of the seedlings that wanted it. 

The awning had quickly become one of Capable's favorite places. They'd slung a hammock in one corner of it, and she could often be found sitting there with a lapful of rough fiber and the drop-spindle someone had made for her out of a piece of antenna and a lug-nut, looking out at the desert as she spun. Looking beyond the Citadel, into the wastes they'd crossed, and crossed back. 

Now, the spindle quiet and still in her lap, she watches Dag and Cheedo. They have never been very far apart, but since the time on the Rig the little space between them has shrunk to nothing. Before, in the vault, there had been a slightly awkward quality in the way they touched. These days they seem to have settled into an unthinking casual closeness, a confidence that the other is there and will _be_ there, no matter what. They move through the world as two halves of a whole, and there is something beautiful in the absently tender way they touch each other, Capable thinks, something which it hurts a little to look at for too long. 

She feels unsettled, the way she's felt a lot since they came back: like a sky massing with distant storm-clouds on the horizon, pregnant with electricity, building up to a vast destructive potential. Sometimes skies like that can clear, the threat of the storm dwindling away to nothing; sometimes the clouds pile up and up into a deadly wall of windflung sand, red-black fury scouring skin from flesh from bone. It helps to do something small and mindless, like this spinning, and to be outside. Capable feels sometimes as if the weather in her head is too big for the rock-cut chambers of the Citadel, as if the air inside presses unbearably on her mind. 

_It's easier when you can't make any promises,_ she thinks. _It's easier when there may not be a future to make promises_ about _. When there are no guarantees for anyone._

Her fingers move unconsciously, picking up the spindle, winding on the length of yarn she's made, then letting the weight drop and twist, drop and twist, drop and twist, feeling the raw fibers pull taut and sturdy into yarn between her fingers. _Don't think about guarantees_ , she tells herself. _Don't think about anything. Just spin._

In the blue darkness of the Rig's backseat, all the light in the world drawn down to the flickering lamp in her fingers, Capable had learned what it felt like to keep a life secret. To be the only one aware of someone's whole existence. It burned in her chest, hot and acid and somehow exhilarating--and frightening, as well. She'd felt the warm heaviness of the others leaning against her shoulders, the swaying and bumping of the Rig's wheels eating up the night, the heat of the lantern in her hands--and the weight of the war boy crouched in the aft lookout post. Nux, the blue-eyed war boy, with an engine scarred into his chest, caught between worlds. 

She had been smiling in the darkness, just a little, feeling the heat and weight of the secret inside her. Knowing it would have to come out, but wanting to keep it her own for a while longer. 

_Don't think about it_.

Oh but you can't shut up your mind, even with all the will in all the world you can't shut up your _mind_ and Capable does not see this peaceful garden with its nodding green growing things, Capable is back in the canyon in the last moment that is frozen like a shutter-click in her head, hearing his voice whispering even over the roar of engines and the rushing wind, whispering to her alone as she drew away from him: _Witness me._

She had watched, and now with the eyes of memory she watches again, his face harden in determination. Watches him turn the wheel, throwing all his strength into it. Watches the terrible slowness with which the Rig first tilts and then twists. Watches the familiar and somehow _dear_ ugly metal structure, their home and hope for what feels like a month-long journey, crumpling and fracturing into unrecognizable junk. Feels her throat close as the Gigahorse draws away from the ruin, out of one world and into the next. Feels very distinctly something being pulled out of her, something snagged in the wreckage they've left behind. There is an emptiness in her chest where that thing had been. 

_He's just a kid at the end of his half-life_ , Angharad had said. 

_Even Larry and Barry stopped chewing on my windpipe...if they don't get me, the night fevers will_.

She'd known, yes of course she'd _known_ , that Nux's long-term prospects weren't bright. She wasn't stupid. But in that space between worlds where none of them were guaranteed to see the sun come up again, it hadn't mattered. She could love him with impunity. 

_Hope is a mistake_.

When she lost him to Valhalla, Capable had not had the luxury of time to mourn at first; and when the time _was_ available, the pain felt somehow acceptable, a price fairly exacted, a toll counted and paid. She had begun to understand that the hole inside her would never go away entirely, but that she could learn to live around it, with it, like a bullet lodged in bone. And then Max Rockatansky had come driving back into the Citadel bleeding into someone else's veins for a second time, and the tentatively solidifying edges of the world broke wide open all over again.

In all the wonder--and guilt, yes, there was a lot of that--surrounding Nux's return, all she had been able to do was keep reassuring herself it was real, he was back, he was really breathing--but just now, just the past day or so, a terrible thought has begun to cloud up in the back of her mind: _I'm going to lose him again._

_I'm going to lose him again and I don't know if I can bear it._

"Capable?"

She blinks hard, the garden coming back into focus. The spindle lies unheeded on the terrace at her feet, half-unwound. Dag is bending over her. "Capable, you all right?"

"Mmh. Yeah," she says, sitting up and wiping at her face, unsurprised to find the dampness of tears drying on her cheeks. 

"You were miles away," Dag says, squatting down to pick up the spindle, looking up at Capable. The sunburn has faded to a faint rose-gold stain in her skin, making her silvery hair look even paler, and freckles have sprinkled themselves across her nose and cheeks.

"Yeah," Capable says again, taking the spindle. "I'm okay. Just...remembering things."

Dag nods. All of them _remember_ things. She's about to reply when Cheedo straightens up and squints out into the desert below, shading her eyes with a hand. "What is it?" Dag asks. 

"Sun reflection. Somebody's driving out there."

Capable follows her gaze: sure enough, there's a brilliant point of light, winking and heliographing off the glass or metal of a moving vehicle. "Must be thirty miles out," Dag says. "Where's he going?"

"The canyon," Capable says without meaning to, abruptly sure of it. "The wreck."

"Why would anybody go back _there_?" Cheedo asks. 

"Salvage, maybe. There's a lot of rolling iron out there getting covered up by sand." Capable shrugs, feeling the stiffness in her shoulders built up from spinning. "I'm going in."

Dag nods. "We'll be down in a while." She reaches out for Cheedo's hand, laces their fingers together, and Capable does not have to be particularly observant to understand that their shared smile means time alone together would be welcome. 

As always the abrupt transition from the brightness of the garden to the dim cool space below feels a little like going blind. Capable holds the spindle in her hands tight, tight enough to hurt, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and thinks again despite herself _I don't know, I don't know if I can bear it._

 

~

 

Max is almost finished with his cairn of speaker parts when the feeling of _being watched_ comes over him, all of a sudden, as strong as a physical touch. 

It has taken him a good half-hour to build a mound over what's left of Rictus--exposed bone now, mostly, with a few sinewy shreds clinging here and there. At one end he's stacked up a rough pyramid of Doof Wagon wreckage, sturdy enough to survive at least a small sandstorm. Now he straightens up, the skin on the back of his neck crawling, and scans the surroundings. 

Nothing. No movement. No glint of sunlight off a scope or binoculars, but _something_ is watching him. Something clever enough to stay still and hidden. 

His right hand drops to the shotgun butt. He knows he makes a pretty good target out here. 

After a few moments the feeling fades a little. Nothing has changed, no visible movement or alteration whatsoever, but the intense awareness of being looked at has backed off. Max lets out a breath he hasn't realized he's been holding. 

_If someone wants to shoot you, they would have done it already_ , he tells himself, hand still on the shotgun. _Unless they're guarding something specific that you haven't found yet._

_What the hell is out here to find?_

_The dead._

"The dead stay dead," Max says out loud, looking back at the humped shape of the Rig, the cairn he's built. _Sometimes, anyway._

_What if there's more survivors?_

_There can't be. There's no way. It's been too long. Would have seen something by now._

Nevertheless Max turns back to the wall of wreckage, baking and shimmering in the noonlight, and begins to climb. Bent metal squalls and shrieks beneath his boots as he hauls himself up, high enough to see over the crumpled remains of the Rig and the Doof Wagon, high enough to see down into the canyon beyond. 

Blowing sand has half-covered most of the ruins. Some are recognizable. Some are not. The smell of death is still strong. Here and there he can see remains: a clawed hand protruding from a misshapen lump of metal black not with paint, but with charring; part of the unmistakable curve of a skull. He is very aware of being in a golgotha, a place of the dead, and thinks that even in twenty, fifty, a hundred years people will still feel that oppressive presence here. 

The landscape opens out into desert again, as Max walks. He does not realize he is nearing the ruins of the Interceptor until he's almost upon it: a mangled, anonymous crumpled shape drifted in sand from which some vagary of the wind has undercut one side, leaving a sort of cornice overhanging the black interior. His eye is caught by something bright nearby. At first he thinks it's a piece of shattered mirror mingled with the sand, but then the familiar angles and curves register in his mind, like the features of a well-beloved face.

Max lets out a startled noise, dropping to his knees, and scrabbles with both hands at the sand. More slides down as fast as he can dig, but he gets his fingers around the edges of the object and tugs at it, hard, and it comes free: the Interceptor's lozenge-shaped blower scoop, twisted and torn away from its mountings.

He sits back on his heels, hugging it tight to his chest, his eyes squeezed shut. For some reason _this_ hurts, this finds its way through the scar tissue of his mind to the part that still responds. Of course he'd known the Interceptor was totaled, but knowing somehow wasn't the same as holding the last piece of it in his hands. 

He doesn't know how long he's been there when the sense of being watched snaps back on like a searchlight, propelling him to his feet, staring wildly around. "Who's there?" he half-shouts. 

Blowing sand: silence. 

Holding the Interceptor's scoop in the crook of his left arm, he draws the shotgun. "Who's there? Show yourself!"

Nothing. Then, faintly, the echo of laughter. He knows that's in his head, though. He knows that laughter very well: the throat that made it is long dead. 

Abruptly the desert is full of whispering. _Max. Max Rockatansky._

_Where are you, Max?_

_(can no one tell me_   
_tell you what?_   
_who killed the world?_   
_not easily...not easily)_

"You're not real," he says, but it's a strengthless half-moan, and the laughter echoes and re-echoes in his head; he thinks he can hear the voices of the dead War Boys whispering, laughing through dried-sinew throats in their metal sepulchres, hear the whickering sound of blown sand stripping away skin and flesh. 

_Witness us, Max Rockatansky._

_Witness. Witness us. Witness those who died._

_Witness_ , a whisper of sand on sand, sand moving in a steady rushing endless wind.

_In a minute I'll start to see them,_ he thinks, _see them crawling out of the ruins, out from the wreckage, coming out to say hello,_ and that more than anything gets him moving again. 

Climbing back over the heaped wreckage with only one arm might not have been possible without the visceral terror pushing Max onward, the sure and absolute certainty that if he stops, if he looks back, he will see them: see shambling half-skeletonized corpses grinning, holding out their rotting hands in invitation: _Witness us_. He half-falls the last several feet and lands awkwardly, sending a flare of pain through his left knee; he's limping as he runs for his borrowed wheels with the Interceptor's scoop still safely cradled in the crook of his arm. 

He ignores the warning throb in that knee as he punches the clutch and lights the engine, ignores everything but the irrational heart-pounding terror until he's put several miles between him and the whispering canyon. When he looks in the mirror all he can see is the distant wreckage through the dissipating cloud of dust thrown up by his own tires. Nothing but noonday sun-shimmer on the sand. No ghosts. 

But the feeling of being watched is still there. As Max stares into the mirror, feeling his heart slow, the metallic aftertaste of panic strong in the back of his throat, a point of light appears and disappears somewhere in the wreckage, then appears again a little distance away. 

Something's moving back there, in the hot silence of wrecked machines and dead men. Something moving, where nothing should be, and he is absolutely sure that it is watching him. That it _was_ watching, the whole time he was there, and that it sees him now. 

Max stares, frozen, looking at that distant point of light, and as he watches it winks out again. Whatever's holding him spellbound snaps. He stamps on the gas, the mutant Jag's engine screaming, and clouds of sand spew from the tires as they bite in. When next he looks in the mirror, the sand-clouds have obscured the wreck again, and he feels almost sick with the relief of it, with the sensation of returning reason and reality. 

By the time he gets back to the Citadel he's almost convinced himself it's nothing more than sunstroke, overdoing it hauling speaker parts around for Rictus Erectus's cairn in the hottest part of the day; that he didn't see the moving point of light, or hear the whispering voices of dead War Boys; that the voices were nothing more than the ones he always hears, anyway, and the sudden irrational terror was just a sun-phantom. 

_Phantoms walk at noon,_ says the voice he knows, and he shakes his head, hard, to silence it; but his hands are trembling when he gets out of the car, and his left knee protests shrilly at being asked to bear weight. He only realizes now that his shirt is not just damp but soaked through with sweat, gamy and sour, like the sweat of a man in a sharp attack of fever.

Max looks down at the battered, torn-off blower scoop in his hands. He has to talk to Furiosa. He hadn't sought her out after his talk with Corpus the evening before, there had been much too much swirling in his head, too many thoughts and images for him to manage cogent conversation. This morning she'd been busy, hadn't had time to chat before he went out on his little burial expedition. Now the need to talk to her is huge, the need to talk to her is like thirst in the desert, overwhelming everything else. 

People are there, talking to him, asking him questions. He shakes his head again, and sound comes back, he can hear their voices properly. "Furiosa," he says. "Where's Furiosa?"

"They're going to fetch her," somebody says. "You should sit down. Go get him some water, hurry."

Max thinks sitting down is a good idea. He can dig it; he feels that he is hip to that particular scene. Dimly he's aware of more talking over and around him, and somebody is holding out a cup of water. He has to let go of the Interceptor's scoop with one hand in order to take it, and that's tough, but he makes it work somehow. Time passes. He's not sure how much. Then someone is bending over him, someone takes his head between two hands that don't match, somebody is looking into his face with a bright blue-gold gaze that cuts right through the swirling gunk in his head like a torch-flame. 

"What the hell have you been doing, fool?" says Imperator Furiosa.


	7. Chapter 7

When she comes to see Nux in the evening, he's working on something with three knitting needles, and the IV is conspicuously absent. 

Furiosa thinks of doses, of dose rates, of carefully measured additions, drops falling into water and diffusing into invisibility. Slow poison building up in bone and blood and muscle, forming the scaffold, the structure of a vast and terrible lie.

What Max had told her does not _surprise_ Furiosa. Very little surprises her, these days. It seems to fit into a space in the world that was already prepared for it, a missing piece of a half-seen puzzle. It does not surprise her, but it sickens her, and bright searing hate is back at the forefront of her mind. Hate for Immortan Joe and the things he had made out of people. Out of who knew how many children. Out of _her_. 

The hate is like a sun-sick headache, making it difficult to see past its sparks and glare. After their return, for a while, a little while, she had been able to push it away and think around it, but the revelation of Joe's Big Lie has brought it right back up. 

"Hi!" Nux says, and smiles up at her. Furiosa watches the smile tilt and slide off his face like a glass off a tray as he gets a good look at her expression. "...What is it?"

She hooks a chair over, turns it around, sits down with her arms folded on the back. This is going to be hard, this is going to be terribly hard and she _doesn't know how to do it_. Better her than Max, with his habit of going monosyllabic and trailing off mid-sentence. Better, but not by much. 

"I got some good news and some bad news," she tells Nux. "Which do you want first?"

Nux is watching her intently. Furiosa notices that he has some color in his face other than those absurdly blue eyes; that the edges of his eye-sockets are no longer so sharply defined. _He's getting better,_ she thinks. _He's getting better already, now that the stuff is gone._ Aloud she says "I guess it's both. Good news is that you aren't stuck as a half-life. You've got time, Nux. All of you do. All the War Boys. Bad news is that Joe made you _think_ you were dying."

His hand goes to the swellings on his neck, the knitting in his lap forgotten. "What do you mean?"

"I mean he gave you something. Put something in the water to keep you all sick, make you think you were running out of time, that you had nothing to live for. And Valhalla to die for."

Nux looks down, still touching Larry and Barry with a fingertip, tracing the roundness of the swellings. When he looks back at Furiosa there's clear understanding in his expression, and an awful kind of weariness: weariness that she doesn't think she can bear to look at for very long. 

"'M not surprised," he says, sounding old for a moment, old and terribly worn. "I wondered sometimes...how come some of us made it so long. If we were all half-lifes."

Furiosa nods. Some of her crew had been older than she was. That thought hurts, as it always does when she lets herself remember them. 

"He lied," Nux continues, not looking at her, eyes focused on something beyond this little room. "About everything."

"Yeah. He did."

This is worse for him, she thinks, much worse for him. _At least I never believed Joe was salvation. At least I never loved him._ "He lied to everyone. But it's over now, he's gone, nobody's poisoning the water anymore. You're going to get better."

"I don't know how," Nux says, and he's looking back at her again, fully present. 

Furiosa reaches out and cups his head with her good hand. "Nobody does. None of us. But we're all figuring it out, one day at a time."

The bright eyes close, reopen, and he leans into her touch, that terrible weariness visible in the gesture. "Does Capable know?"

"Not yet. I'm going to tell her next."

Nux nods. He takes a long, deep breath--Furiosa can hear something in his chest rustling like windblown sand, and frowns a little--and lets it out again, and when he looks up again the ghost of his usual enthusiasm is back. "If I'm gonna get better they have to let me out of here," he says. 

"They will," she promises. Sooner rather than later, by the look of him. "Don't push yourself. That leg's gotta have time to heal."

Nux makes a face that indicates broken legs are of very little import. "I c'n get around in a wheely-chair, or maybe crutches. I wanna be _doing_ something."

"You are," she says, pointing at the knitting. "What's going on with that?"

He brightens immediately. "Cables! Look, you can make it make patterns. I, uh, I finished your scarf, but it's kind of messy, I can make you a better one."

"Let me see," Furiosa says. He reaches over to the table by the bed and--rather shyly--hands over something lumpy and irregular. 

There are dropped stitches laddering their way through the fabric, and the tension's all over the place, tight and loose and uneven as hell, and somewhere along the way he managed to add a couple of stitches so it's wider at one end. 

Without a word Furiosa unwinds the scarf she's wearing and puts Nux's version on, looping it twice around. He watches this, and then startles her with a sudden and unexpected hug. 

"Oof," she says, and after a moment puts her arms awkwardly around him, pats his back. "You did good, kid. But you better hurry up and make Max one next, or he's gonna be jealous."

"I will," Nux says, letting go, smiling so brightly she finds herself doing it as well, as if in reflection. "Where is he?"

"Oh, he managed to give himself heat exhaustion running around in the desert like an idiot, digging up that car of his," Furiosa says. "Brought back the blower scoop and won't let go of it."

"Is he okay?" Big, worried eyes. 

"He's fine, he's just sleeping it off. With the scoop tucked in beside him." She has no intention of telling Nux about the moving point of light Max had seen in the wreckage, or the whispering ghosts. "He'll come see you tomorrow."

Now the eyes are narrowed a little, as if he's calculating something. "That Interceptor. The one Slit was riding, at the end. That's Max's car." It isn't a question.

Furiosa nods. "He's a little sensitive about it."

"Well, yeah," Nux says. "It's his _car_. Course he is. It's...there's nothing left, huh?"

"It got crushed between two rigs and set on fire," Furiosa says drily. "I don't think that's gonna buff out."

"Never say never," he says, and she can actually see him mentally working out the edges of the problem, roughing out the work involved. His fingers move, running over invisible steel. "Can somebody go out there and bring it back?"

"There's not much there. Just scrap, he says."

"Still. Bring what there is."

It's not the voice of a tired and still not-very-well kid: it's the voice of someone with a job to do, eager to get started. Furiosa smiles despite herself, and he tilts his head at her. "What?"

"Nothing," she says. "I'll make you a deal: we'll go fetch the scrap-iron and you can do whatever you want with it, but only if you promise to take real good care of that leg and listen when people tell you to stop work and rest."

He nods, enthusiastically, and Furiosa thinks he'd probably agree to any conditions she decided to set if it meant he got to get grease back on his hands. "I will, I promise. Don't tell him."

"Why not?"

"Just don't. Not yet, anyway. Please?"

He's looking earnest again, and Furiosa can't handle that. "Okay, okay, fine. In the meantime, you keep working on those pulleys."

"Cables."

"Whatever." She gives the top of his head a brief rub, and gets up. "And thanks for the scarf."

"You really like it?"

"Best scarf I ever got given," Furiosa says; and when she leaves, the sick-bright sparkles of her Joe hate are clouded right over with a sense of hope.

~

Nux doesn't feel any different. 

Part of him thinks he should. Thinks that finding out you're _not_ doomed to an early grave should make some kind of difference; but all he feels is the steady pain of his leg and the familiar tightness in his chest. 

He can remember very clearly the moment when his unquestioning faith in Immortan Joe had broken for the first time: lying curled on his side in the rear turret of the Rig, as miserable as he had ever been, the chemical taste of chrome paint vast and sickening in his throat and sinuses. Hating himself, hating his failure. And then Capable had been there, and Capable had touched him with such unexpected kindness, such unearned care, and spoken to him, and something inside his head cracked straight across. 

Broken mirror-glass still reflects a picture, but the fracture-lines irrevocably alter what's reflected. Nux had still believed, a little, in his redeemer--until the moment when the last of the pieces fell. _He's dead_. Immortan Joe, dead and gone and _over_. Everything he had ever known and believed in. The sensation of emptiness, of howling void, had been dizzying. 

There's nothing left to break. The knowledge that it had all been a lie makes him tired rather than angry: the waste of so many lives, so many people, is too huge to really fit into his head. _Better not to_ , he thinks. _Better think about the things you_ can _do. About the future._

He closes his eyes, wishing he had something to draw with. Planning out projects is much easier if you can draw diagrams; for some reason the act of putting them on paper solidifies the ideas, gives them form and shape, lets you see the edges and whether they'll fit together. Without knowing what really _is_ left of the Interceptor he's working blind, but that's okay. When you get down to a certain level, there aren't any surprises left. _If it's really totaled_ , Nux thinks, _if it really is beyond repair, then I'll figure something else out._ But he's seen utter wrecks go into the shop caves and come out under their own power many, many times. It's the only kind of hope he's known for much of his life: what's broken can be remade, what's old can be made new again. Nothing is ever really dead when its parts are still rolling, and almost everything can find a use. 

He opens his eyes again and looks down at the knitting in his lap for a long moment before picking it up again and going back to work. It's soothing, having a job to do, but even the thought of getting his hands dirty again--of doing his _real_ job--makes him twice as itchy to get out of here. Nux thinks of Furiosa taking off her old scarf and putting his on, and that helps; the needles click a little faster, the yarn sliding through fingers that now keep the tension steady without conscious effort. _I'll get better_ , he thinks. _I'll get better at everything_. 

He wonders a little what Capable will say, when Furiosa tells her. Some half-sensed instinct tells him that she's frightened, that she's been frightened and trying not to let him know, and that now things will be easier between them. Less awkward. Although he's pretty sure he's always _going_ to be awkward about some stuff, that's kind of never gonna change. 

But there's a future. Nux has no idea what to expect from futures; he's never had much experience with the concept. It's frightening. It's also exhilarating, like suddenly finding out you had a sixth gear all along, feeling the sweet rightness of shifting up and into a ratio that lets you push it beyond what you thought was top end. There's a future, and it's not just fire and blood--and, best of all, he doesn't have to face it on his own.


	8. Chapter 8

In the end they find it hidden carefully away in Organic Mechanic's lair--which nobody had really wanted to explore, even though Organic himself was no longer with them. A translucent plastic bottle, graduation markings down the side, half-full of a brownish murky fluid. The smell knocks them back a bit. The neck had once been sealed with a sort of pale green tape with black stripes on it; other than that, there are no labels. But beside the bottle they find disposable pipettes, a stack of them. Whatever is in the bottle, Organic hadn't wanted to touch it either. 

Corpus confirms it. "That's the stuff. Once a month, into the cistern. Don't ask me what it is, I never had anythin' to do with that whole side of things."

"Where'd he get it?" Furiosa asks. She sets the bottle of Immortan Joe's poison down, not wanting to hold it longer than strictly necessary. 

"Trader."

"Trader from where?" 

"I dunno," he says, and there's that little flash of the eyes toward the horizon. 

Furiosa has had about enough of this, and she closes the little space between them, drawing a knife--short and ugly, but very sharp--from its sheath. "Trader from where?" she repeats, with the knife against his throat. 

Corpus swallows convulsively, skin pushing against the edge of the blade, and winces. "From the southeast! Bartertown maybe, I don't know, I had nothing to do with it, I don't _know_!"

"Mm," she says, and the knife stays where it is for another moment before she takes it away. "Traders from the southeast. Where that mirrorglass city's supposed to be."

Corpus nod-nod-nods. "That's a legend, that's not real."

"A lot of things aren't real, round here." Furiosa turns to go.

"...Hey," he says, and she pauses halfway across the vault chamber. He's rubbing at his throat where the knife had rested. "Look, I gotta know. Why haven't you killed me? Why'm I still here?"

Furiosa looks at him, eyes unreadable, for a long moment. "Been too much killing," she finally says. "And we need your knowledge." 

"You can't run the Citadel. You don't know how. Not without the old system. Not without slaves."

"Maybe." She shrugs a little. "We're gonna try."

"You can't _do_ it," he says. "You don't know what you're doin', you're an Imperator, you lead war parties, you don't know the first thing about this kind of shit."

"That's why I'm not the one in charge. There's a group of us." She hadn't meant to tell him that, hadn't meant to have any part of this conversation, and most of her wants to just get the hell out and go find something she _can_ do, but Furiosa finds herself walking back over to the window-wall where he hangs in his hammock. 

"Group of who? You're a war leader, the bloodbag's a...whatever the fuck he is, Dad's wives are just women, those harpies who came back with you are _old_."

"Ever consider that it's not easy to survive long enough to _get_ to be old, out there?" she says. "The Vuvalini know what they're doing, believe me."

"They know how to manage a self-contained feudal city-state?"

"We'll learn," Furiosa says, with an edge in her voice. "So far it seems to be working."

"The people are confused. Don't know who's really in charge, who's supposed to tell who what to do. I hear 'em talking when they come with my food. The War Boys, what's left of 'em, they're gettin' restless, and that's something you _don't_ want. You took away their whole world, _Furiosa_." He draws out the syllables into a mocking title, rather than a name. "You took away their redeemer, and now they gotta have something to fit into that hole, sooner rather than later. Or you're gonna have chaos. You tell 'em already about the stuff?"

"We're doing that next. Calling everyone--all the people--to the Bowl for an announcement."

Corpus laughs, a nasty bubbly sound. "Good luck with that. Gonna have riots."

"Not just me doing the telling. All of us. Me, Max, the Wives, the Mothers, the Vuvalini."

"Too much. It's gonna look like you all made it up together. Conspiracy."

Furiosa hides a wince: he's right, he's right about a lot of things. "Then what _should_ we do?"

"Have the Mothers do it. Have the Mothers out front. Then you come out to join 'em. The people got no reason to trust the bloodbag or the Vulvaloonies, but they know the Mothers and they know you. It's still gonna be touchy."

Slowly she nods. "Why are you doing this?"

"Doin' what?"

"Helping me."

He shrugs, making the hammock sway a little. "Guess I don't wanna get killed in the riots you and your pals will cause if you fuck it all up," he says, after a moment. 

"Decided you like being alive, even now?"

"Yeah, well, 's a hard habit to break," Corpus says, and gives another shrug.

When she's gone, carrying the bottle, he resumes his surveillance of the distant wreckage. Something out there is moving again. There's a point of light which appears and disappears, moving from place to place. It's only visible at certain times of day.

And night. 

~

Nux wakes in a cloud of red. Soft, sweet-smelling red. Capable is still lying entwined with him, and his face is buried in her hair. 

A delicious sense of...lazy, dreamy satisfaction is still filling him to capacity, to overflow. He feels completely disinclined to move, but it's not the heavy unpleasant lassitude he's used to when he's low on blood. This is more a sort of general approval of the universe just at the moment, with no need to change a single thing. 

Okay, his leg still hurts. He could do without that. But everything _else_ is pretty splendid. Nux wraps the end of a curl round his finger, stretching the hair out gently and watching it spring back to its original helix. He thinks he could watch it do that all day and be perfectly satisfied: there's something fascinating about the way it works, silky-soft and yet determined, returning to its set shape over and over without growing brittle from work-hardening. 

Capable had come running in a little while after Furiosa had left, and Nux had been a little surprised at the intensity with which she scrambled onto the bed and proceeded to cover every inch of his face with kisses. When her initial ferocity had subsided he'd asked what had prompted it, knowing the answer, and her expression had warmed a wonderful sort of ache in his chest. _You're not gonna die,_ she'd said, and Nux could swear her eyes had _sparkled_. 

_So I hear tell_ , he had said, and reached out to touch her face, cup her cheek, draw her closer; and then they were kissing, not tentative and exploratory, not nervous and impulsive, but warm with delight. Nux hasn't had a lot of cause to consider the word _delight_ , much less actually experience it, but he thinks now that he's got a pretty good handle on what delight feels like from the inside. And desire.

_Your leg,_ she'd said, breathing fast, flushed, her eyes still so bright. _Will it...I don't want to hurt you..._

At that point the state of his broken leg had been at an all-time low on Nux's list of priorities, way down there with the idea that anyone could happen by and walk in on them. _Improvise_ , he'd gasped, and then she was on top of him and then his ability to string lucid thoughts together had vanished for a little while. 

Now, playing with Capable's hair, he wonders vaguely what time it is, and what had woken him. Some sound, maybe. People in the hall. Soon, he thinks, soon they'll let him out of here and he can get to work properly, get his hands on what's left of Max's car and see if it can be saved. He's lost count of how long he's been in the infirmary, but whatever it is, it's way too long. They can just give him some crutches and he can hobble around with the cast on his leg, no worries at all. 

The thought of what it's like down there in the caverns right now--what it's like for the remaining War Boys, with no Immortan to follow--is one Nux has been actively avoiding for a little while now. He's had other things to occupy his mind. But the rest of them, what's left of Joe's army...it can't be good. They've lost so many of the War Boys that the Pups are probably not getting the supervision they're used to. And, well, what _do_ you do when your god-king and your purpose have both vanished with the thud of a jawless body hitting the ground? 

He should be down there, Nux thinks. He should be down there with them, because he's the only one they have who knows the right things. 

The sense of pleasant laziness fades, and he must have made some sound or moved a bit because Capable mumbles into his chest and then lifts her head, looking sleepily at him. Her hair had been somewhat chaotic to begin with: now it's beyond his limited powers of description, sticking out in all directions in wild exuberance. Nux thinks she's the loveliest thing he's ever seen, and he's seen some pretty gorgeous sights, most of them possessing at least four wheels. 

"Hey," he says, softly. "'S okay. Go back to sleep."

"What time is it?" 

"Dunno." He touches the outer edges of her nebula of hair, smiling. "You got somewhere to be?"

"Right here," she says, and props her chin on his chest. "Right exactly here."

Nux had thought himself pretty completely worn out for the moment, but part of him begs to differ. Capable smiles again, and kisses his chest, and then runs the tip of her tongue along the raised line of a cylinder head, and he catches his breath in a gasp. "You think anyone's gonna come l-lookin' for you in the next ten minutes?" he asks, his voice unsteady. 

" _Ten minutes_?" she says, mock-scowling, shifting against him under the covers with maddening, delicious friction. "You gotta be able to do better than _that_ , War Boy."

"I'll...see what I can do."

~

Along with the ledges that are now brimming with green, exuberant plant growth--along with the parts of the crag that are popular and pleasant and made comfortable--there are a few which are not. Too narrow, or too hard to get to for people to want to bother climbing out to reach them, especially in the dark. These are the only places in the constantly-bustling Citadel where you can be relatively sure of solitude. 

These are where you come to brood. 

Max is very good at it. He's sitting with his back to the still-warm rock face, his bad leg stretched out, right forearm resting on his drawn-up right knee. Beyond the toe of his boot the ledge stretches a few feet further on before ending abruptly: a couple hundred feet of clear air, straight down. This particular ledge faces out into the desert rather than down into the Bowl, which is still thronged with scurrying people, big torch-flames pushing back the gathering dark. From here, though, the view is deepening from blue into black. 

In a little while, the moon will rise, and the desert will be almost as bright as day--stranger than day, a different place entirely, blue and silver instead of savage gold. The part of Max's brain that sometimes throws up little tidbits of factoid or image from the previous world stirs a little at the thought. _There was a land in a story that was only desert by day_ , he thinks. _At night it was...something else, a forest, trees made of light._ Why he should remember that just now completely escapes him. 

There's a gathering sense of...confinement, somehow, despite the fact that the only thing above him now is sky. _We found the lie. We found its source. They know the truth now, so they can build a new world based on_ that _rather than deceit. That's something. That's not redemption, but it's not nothing._

He has not been around people for this long in...Max tries to remember, and can't. In a long, long time. Long enough to relegate it to the part of the past that cannot now reach out a long arm to touch him. 

Absently he reaches out and strokes the sharp angle of the Interceptor's scoop with his bandaged hand. It's sitting beside him, never far from his side, its chrome gleaming even in the dark. It hurts, it still hurts, knowing that it's the only piece left. When he leaves--

_If,_ his mind supplies, and he shakes his head in negation. When he leaves--because he will, sooner or later--it will not be this familiar silhouette shaping his view of the road ahead. It has been part of that view for so long that driving a car without it feels strange, incomplete, but the growing need to _be_ on the road again overrides that. He wants to be gone. He wants to be responsible for nothing more than his own survival, even as he knows the kid's smile and Furiosa's steady gaze will be riding with him, that they've taken up residence in the strange passages of his head. He can no more leave them behind than he can evict the other residents, the voices that come and go and will not let him _sleep_ more than a few hours at a time. 

_So I'll take a few more passengers,_ he thinks. _Better in the head than in the flesh._

And when he leaves, he will give the wreckage--and whatever walks there--a very wide berth indeed. The thought of it makes him shiver, and he deliberately looks out to his right, the other direction from the place where he knows the wreck lies.

Something rattles nearby, pebbles against rock, and Max's hand instinctively drops to the butt of the shotgun as a dark shape makes its way up the path to the ledge. "Don't shoot," says a voice, cracked and worn but audibly amused. "Friend, not foe."

He relaxes a little. The shape settles itself down on the ledge beside him with a groan and a curse, leaning back against the rock wall. "You plannin' on camping out here tonight?"

It's Magda, the Vuvalini who'd taken the Gigahorse's wheel while Max did a little impromptu blood-exchanging in the back. "Mmh," he says. 

"Picked a fine place for it." Why is she here, he wonders. Aren't there enough ledges for everyone to have their own?

"Mmh."

"Gonna rope yourself to the rock, or take your chances rollin' over the edge in your sleep?"

"Mmh."

Magda sighs, and he can hear something slosh and the sound of a cap being unscrewed. "Here," she says, and a flask is nudged into his hand. "If you're gonna brood, you might as well do the thing right."

It's the fiery flavorless moonshine they brew from some plant or other deep in the caverns. Max takes a swig and coughs as it burns all the way down, wondering not for the first time if the stuff actually hails from Gastown. But the burn just turns into a spreading warmth, and the second swallow goes down like silk.

"Not too much," she says, and takes the flask away. "You lose your balance on that path, they won't have to dig a hole to bury you in, just fill it in on top."

It gets a snicker out of him--startling himself. "What do you want?"

"He speaks in sentences!" Magda says reverently, and takes a swig from the flask herself. "You're thinking about buggering off, aren't you."

"What?" 

"Scarpering. Doing a bunk. Skipping out. Packing up and headin' out into the desert on your lonesome, chasing whatever ghosts it is you're running after. It's plain to see."

He blinks. The moon has risen, and there's enough light to see her expression, although he kind of wishes he couldn't: it's both rueful and exasperated. "Well?" he says, after too long. 

"Well, _don't_. From what I've seen you ain't a complete bloody idiot _all_ the time, so you ought to know better than that."

Max can feel himself bristling. _She's right, you know,_ says a voice, conversationally. It's the one he can't quite place, the one that's only been there since the beginning of this whole adventure. _You don't like being told things you already know to be true._

_Belt up,_ he thinks. "My business. Where I go, what I do." And he's not running _after_ ghosts. He's running _from_ them.

"It's not that simple, is it though? They need you."

He looks away, out into the silvered desert, and lifts the awkward weight of the scoop into his lap. "Not anymore." Don't they have enough guns or drivers to keep themselves going?

"Yes, they do. Maybe not to drive the Rig or shoot people in the head or similar, but they need _you_. That's not somethin' you get to control. And what's more, _you_ need _them_ , Mr. Universal Donor. Furiosa's told us what you were like at first, and I saw you like you are now, and I have to say there's improvement. Maybe not at the moment, but still."

Max leans his head back against the rock. Maybe if he doesn't say anything she'll get tired of it and go away. Maybe the Interceptor will rise from the dead and take him away again into the desert wastes where he doesn't have to think, doesn't have to speak, doesn't have to _be_ anything more than a handful of instincts glued together with desperation.

_I am the one who runs from the living_ and _the dead._

"It's not about you now," Magda says, more gently. "You can't tell people to stop caring about you just because you're scared of it. Big boy like you should know that by now."

"I'm not--" he begins, and then just sighs, closing his eyes. 

"Nothin' wrong with being scared," she says. "But you don't get to wiggle out of this one, and I know you know it, so are you gonna sit out here all night and brood or are you coming in to get some dinner before it's all gone?"

"I need..." He gestures with the hand that isn't holding the scoop. "Room. To be...not around people all the time. It feels like it's squeezing my head."

Magda nods, and tucks the flask away, hauling herself creakily to her feet. The shadow she casts in the moonlight is velvet-black. "Fair enough," she says.

"Tell--" He stops, and swallows, feeling the moonshine blunting the edges of his thoughts. "Tell them to save me some. For later."

She laughs. "Can't promise anything. But I'll tell 'em to try."

He doesn't reply, and after a moment she starts down the steep path, more pebbles bouncing and clattering. The silence and vastness of the night come down again around him, but it feels subtly different now, somehow more balanced, better fitting. 

Max doesn't know how much time has passed when the pinprick of light away to the left catches his attention. A cold weight drops into his gut, and he can feel the adrenaline suddenly roar through his blood as he watches the light vanish, flicker, reappear, moving in its slow and unpredictable dance. The worst thing isn't imagining what's making that light; oh, no. The worst thing is that he _knows_ , he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he's going to have to find out.


	9. Chapter 9

When he gets back inside--what must be a good half an hour later, waiting to see if the light would come again, waiting to see if it would leave the distant wreck and begin to come closer, begin to cross the blue expanse of desert currently separating it from the Citadel--he finds he doesn't have _time_ to worry about the light. There are fires here that need putting out, and he doesn't know any more than the rest of them about how to run this place, but he can do what he is told--and he can hold somebody else up when their own strength is flagging. 

Furiosa shoots him a grateful look when he joins her and Magda and the others, and soon they're talking about how to organize the remaining War Boys into a scaled-down patrol rota. Max knows they need something to _do_ other than sitting around thinking about their lives and how much of them they have spent living somebody else's Big Lie. There's Gastown and the Bullet Farm to deal with as well: they too have passed to the awkward administration of the people who had been running them all along, and Corpus keeps on about the importance of establishing and maintaining official relations and trade agreements with both of them. It's decided that a delegation from the Citadel needs to visit both fiefdoms, and this will also require War Boy escorts. They talk for what feels like hours, and for a while being surrounded by people doesn't feel as if it's squeezing the bones of Max's head in a gentle but inexorable vise.

It isn't until much later, when he's alone again in his own room, that the thought of the light comes back, and with it comes a whole-body shiver, almost a convulsion. He is not good at being frightened, he doesn't know how to do it properly: he's used to threats, _very_ used to threats and danger and the constant urge to run from the things echoing inside of his own head, but that's not...the same thing as fear. He doesn't know what it _is_ , and that, Max thinks, is really the problem. 

He makes his hands unclench slowly, setting down the Interceptor's scoop on the table near at hand, and then sits down on the bed. His bad knee is more or less functional again, but he needs the brace more than he's needed it in a while. The prospect of taking it off--of taking off his clothes in general--seems pretty ridiculously complicated, insurmountably so, and unnecessary; he just tugs and hauls off his boots and shrugs out of the jacket, lying down on his side. It had taken him a while to get used to a bed again, an actual bed designed for you to sleep stretched out full-length, rather than the seat of some vehicle or other, or the ground. At first he'd been a little alarmed by the sheer softness of the mattress, as if he might sink into it like some kind of warm quicksand, but it's familiar enough now.

Only this time sleep doesn't come. Max is used to being so tired at the end of a day that he never has to worry about _falling_ asleep: it's the dreams that come along and wake him every few hours with his heart pounding and his fists clenched that he doesn't look forward to. But now, tonight, even with Magda's moonshine still faintly floating in his mind, he finds himself staring into the darkness of the little rock-cut room, shifting restlessly on the bed, on edge. 

Max isn't sure how much time has passed when somebody taps softly on the door. 

"Yeah?" he says. 

"It's me."

He scrubs at his face, stubble prickling and rasping. "Come in."

Furiosa lets herself in, the light from the corridor outlining her for a moment, a black shape against gold brightness. She hesitates a moment before closing the door again, and neither of them speak while their eyes readjust. 

"Can't sleep, huh," she says finally, coming over to the bed. 

"No."

"What is it?"

"Don't know," he says, and can hear his voice sounding funny. Then clothing rustles and she's sitting on the edge of the bed, a nearness in the dark. 

"Magda said you were thinking of leaving, earlier."

 _Shut up, Magda_ , he thinks, weary. "Mmh."

"These people need you," Furiosa says. "Their whole world's turned inside out. _We_ need you. Need all the help we can get."

Max squeezes his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his palms over them, watching gold geometrical patterns sizzle and glitter in the darkness. He has already had this conversation once, and it was pretty miserable the first time. "Mmh," he says again. "Okay."

"I need you," she says, much more quietly. He takes his hands away, opens his eyes, blinking until the patterns fade. He can't see her clearly, just a shape in the darkness, but he is acutely aware of her presence; her weight on the mattress, the way she takes up space, the way she moves _through_ space--efficient, self-contained, no wasted effort. He can hear the little creaks as she breathes, as the belts around her ribs shift slightly. 

Abruptly he's back in the hot jouncing dustiness of the cab, looking up at her from the floor hatch, with the girl beside him. _I may need you to drive the Rig,_ she says.

The raw places where the muzzle had scraped at his skin still burn, but the astonishing relief of not having it there is stronger than the pain. He flicks a glance at the shift lever, the dials on the dash, and then back at her. _Hey. What's your name?_ she asks. _What do I call you?_

_Does it matter?_

And a lifetime later--several lifetimes, it feels like--cupping her head in his hands, listening to her whisper _get them home_ , feeling all that force, all that intensity draining out like water into sand, almost gone, almost over, and thinking _no, this is_ not _how it ends._ It is easy to give her his blood, rapping out orders to the others around him, aware of and grateful for their help. It is much, much more difficult to give her his name, but he does it just as gladly: it is, after all, the only thing he has left to give.

He looks up at her now in the darkened bedroom and thinks: _some of her blood was once mine._ It sends him searching for images that are beyond him, of living fluid drawn through the dark highways of his body, swirling and flooding through the portals and chambers of his heart, never still, never resting, moving on and on in unending dark--and then, briefly, full of light as it passes through a clear vein of tubing, seeing and seen by the sun, before plunging into another darkened world; a tributary flowing into a new stream, a new river, mingling with it, sent along its way by the beating of a new heart. 

"Stay," she says, and in the dark he nods.

"Yeah." He can hear her shift slightly--her posture easing into something more relaxed--and adds "...can you?" after a moment. _Stay here_ , he means: because he thinks if she is here he might be able to sleep. He doesn't have to say this. He doesn't often have to say a lot of things around Furiosa, because she can somehow read his silence.

In reply there is something that might be a chuckle, and then leather creaks as she takes off her own boots and unbuckles the harness of her arm. He can hear it clank gently when she lays it down on the floor. "Move over, fool," she says. 

Max makes room, and she lies down beside him, turning on her side. Again he is very, very aware of her physical presence, of the space between them, and while it is fascinating and takes up a lot of his available brain to process, he is also aware of the weight of fatigue. 

"Good night," he says, awkwardly. 

"G'night," says Imperator Furiosa. 

~

At first returning to the caverns had been...not scary, not exactly, but _strange_ in a way Nux hasn't felt before. The moment when he'd stopped in the doorway, leaning on his crutches (already sore, but never mind), and the din of conversation and work had just stopped, that had been difficult. Feeling that many sets of eyes on him at once, after who knew how long trapped in the infirmary, had felt a bit like stepping out of the shadows into the noonday sun, like the moment when the light hit you with almost physical force. 

There had been silence for the space of four or five heartbeats, and then someone yelled _It's Nux_ , and the noise had surged back and claimed him in a wave, and he'd stepped into the cavern and felt the familiar smell and heat and clamor all around him as if he'd never been away. 

There had been the predictable staredown, too, between him and the senior War Boy who'd taken over telling everybody what to do. Furiosa was the last of the Imperators, the only Imperator they had, and Furiosa was busy almost all the time. She came down here as often as she could to talk to them, to see and be seen, move through their space in a kind of tacit wordless reassurance that yes, the world might have broken, but maybe it was the kind of broke that could be fixed. So far it had held them together; nobody had really gotten up the impetus to organize any kind of independent force, but Nux knew that was just going to be a matter of time. It was why he'd insisted on getting down here as quickly as he could, against all medical advice. 

He'd swung and clunked his way across the cavern, the others parting to let him through, and the other War Boy--his name was Wrack--stepped into his way, fists clenched and teeth bared. Close enough to kiss, Wrack had tried his best to glare Nux down, and Nux had merely stood there on one foot and two crutches, not even swaying. _I've lived, and died, and lived again_ , he had thought, staring evenly into Wrack's eyes. _Seen things you wouldn't believe. You don't even begin to rate._

He'd felt it when the balance shifted, when what little authority the other War Boy had claimed slipped over to him; and a moment later Wrack had backed off, still scowling ferociously but no longer actively trying to intimidate. And Nux had turned to the rest of them and begun to talk. 

He's never had to be good with words, he doesn't even know how he came up with them, but he'd begun to talk anyway and found that they came out with surprising ease. He can't even remember exactly what he had said, only that it was something along the lines of: _Joe lied, Joe lied about everything, you know that, we're not bound to die for glory, we gotta try living instead; gotta try to make things instead of kill things, repair what's been broken, build something new._ He'd talked about the others, about how they were working to reorganize the Citadel into something that worked for itself instead of for a rarely-visible god-king. 

It helps, of course, that the War Boys most loyal to Joe were the ones who had not come back from the Fury Road. Those left behind had been junior, inexperienced, and now willing to listen to him because he was one of them, he had fought and worked his way up the ranks and had his own wheel--driven the War Rig!--but most of all knew how they thought and what they wanted. 

After that he had worked his way through the caverns looking at the builds and rebuilds they had going. His hands itched to get dirty, but he knew he didn't have the strength for it. Now, sitting with his leg up and watching them work on the gutted shell of an ancient Merc van, he is both satisfied with his accomplishments and a little alarmed at just _how_ exhausted he is. _I didn't even do anything, I just came down here and did a bunch of talking,_ he thinks. It feels a bit like the heavy lassitude that comes when he's in need of a top-up. _Just...sit here for a while. Get my breath back. I can do this._

Someone tugs at his pants leg, and he looks down to see a War Pup staring at him with big dark-shadowed eyes. "Hey," Nux says. 

"Did you really die?" the Pup asks, solemnly.

He has to smile. "I s'pose not. Came real close, though."

"Did you see Valhalla?"

"Nope. Just a lot of darkness."

"Oh." This seems to satisfy the kid's curiosity, but then he looks up again. In the dimness of the caverns, his eyes look very bright to Nux. "Did you really drive a War Rig?"

"I really did," he says, and when the kid shyly reaches up to him, Nux leans down and hoists him up to sit beside him on the bench. "It was totally shine. Shinest thing I ever did."

"What's it like?" 

He looks down at the small white-painted head leaning against him, suddenly fiercely glad that the lie _is_ a lie, that this War Pup isn't doomed to a short and brutish half-life. That maybe whatever they make out of the Citadel will be a better world for this generation. "Well, first off," he says, "you got twice the forward speeds than in a regular car cause the rig's so heavy, gettin' it moving takes super low gears. Then you gotta remember you're much longer than a car goin' into a turn..."

Nux talks about crawling under the Rig in the middle of the battle to repair one of the engines, kneeling on the hood to spit nitromethane down the blower intakes, and somewhere along the line realizes the Pup's gone to sleep leaning against his side, grubby thumb firmly plugged into mouth. Pff. He doesn't feel like moving--he's still exhausted from the walk down here, and he doesn't want to wake the kid right now. He'll just...stay put, for a while. Yeah. For a little while. 

~

Next day the Citadel delegation sets off on the short trek to Gastown. Furiosa is driving, but this time it isn't a two-thousand-horsepower war rig: this time it's what used to be a huge old Lincoln land-barge with a Roller's grille and a bristling bouquet of spiky metal horns on the front, towing a separate gas-tank, escorted by two War Boys with their lancers. Max watches them go from Corpus's eyrie, arms folded. He'd left the Interceptor's blower scoop in his room, this morning. 

They had been talking to Gastown by the lamp signal on and off for the past weeks, and everyone was confident that the delegation would be met with a welcome rather than a hail of gunfire. If nothing else, they needed to trade: guzzoline for water.

Corpus sits back from the telescope, tacitly allowing Max to have a look; through the scope the three-car convoy looks very small in the vastness of the desert. He can hear Corpus's wheezy breathing more noticeably than usual, with a faint crackle at the end of each exhale. 

"You lot aren't doing a completely terrible job," Corpus says, unexpectedly. Max straightens up. Even without the scope he can see the bright moving glare of the cars' glass and chrome, winking and heliographing in the sun.

"Huh?"

"Things are better now. Not great, but closer to stable. Gotta hand it to you, I thought this place was gonna go up in flames, but you lot seem to've got the edges of a handle on it."

Max blinks. This is not something he would ever have expected to hear. "I'm not doing anything," he says. 

"I don't mean you personally, blood-bag." Corpus coughs. "Your little...whatever you call it. Cadre. Council. Furi- _o_ -sa and those desert witches, the people's leaders, whoever else. Seems like you are actually capable of belting up and listening when someone is tellin' you shit that you need to know."

"I'll pass that along," he says, looking back out at the desert. 

They'd sent out a patrol before dawn, scouting the area, and apparently had found some useful scrap; another group with one of the remaining wreckers had been dispatched to retrieve it, or at least that's what Max had gathered they were doing. He's spent the morning helping the construction crews work on the new dwellings that are going up around the edges of the Bowl. Keeping busy helps. Keeping busy doesn't stop him thinking about voices and lights that shouldn't be there and responsibility, but it pushes those thoughts back to arm's length and lets him get on with things. And he needs to be tired at the end of the day: needs to be as tired as possible so that sleep comes easily and fast. 

Having Furiosa there had not made the dreams leave him alone, exactly. When he'd woken as expected in the small hours, gasping and wide-eyed in the dark, she had just rolled over and mumbled something, reached for him without really waking all the way. Her hand had patted vaguely at his shoulder, his neck, cupped his head for a moment--and the simple reassurance of the touch had banished the horrors again. In the morning they hadn't had to say anything to each other, no awkward filler-small-talk while she buckled on her arm and splashed water on her face, while he laced up his boots and had his own cursory wash. Max still can't fit his head around the discovery that it is possible to be around another person, to share their space, without needing to resort to saying words in order to communicate. It is such a huge and improbable discovery that he does not want to think very hard about it, in case it stops being true. 

He realizes Corpus has said something, and shakes his head in the habitual shutting-up-the-voices gesture. "What?"

"I said, go get me a drink," Corpus repeats, rolling his eyes. 

It takes another moment for him to get going, and when he's halfway across the chamber he only just barely hears Corpus add, "She'll be okay, bloodbag."

"What?" he says again.

"She can take care of herself on a run to fuckin' Gastown, don't worry about it."

"I wasn't--"

"Fetch me a drink. And make 'em put something in it, 'm feelin' a bit crook."

Max shakes his head again as if to dislodge something stuck in it, and hurries out.

~

The little convoy doesn't return until evening, its shadows stretching out long and blue in the reddening light. Max is down in the Bowl when the three cars arrive, and can see Nux among the War Boys watching from above. He comes over to join the throng of people surrounding the cars, helps gently clear the way for Furiosa and her escort to roll onto the platform. This time there are no desperate Wretched clinging to the edges to be shoved clear by War Boy boots; entry and exit to the Citadel itself is no longer regulated by violence. 

He stands by the mongrel Continental as they are hoisted up to the cavern-floor level. She looks up at him from the driver's seat and smiles a bit; but she still has work to do, and he gets out of the way as she climbs out and starts giving orders to her people. Soon the fuel pod is decoupled and rolled away to replenish the Citadel's tanks; one lucky War Boy is given the task of driving the Lincoln back into its assigned bay; several more are given packages to carry. Max watches, expressionless, but when she dusts off her hands and comes to join him he too cracks a smile. 

"How'd it go?"

"Just about like we expected," Furiosa says. He falls into step with her as they climb the stairs to the residential levels above the War Boys' caverns. "The senior engineers are in charge there now that the People Eater's gone. They've had some rough patches but it looks like they got a good handle on running the place."

"No trouble along the way?"

"No Buzzards, if that's what you mean," she says, scrubbing her hand through her short-cropped hair. Dust drifts down in rusty-gold showers. "They're still keeping to their territory, at least for now. Funny thing, though." 

"What?"

"Your moving light in the wreckage."

"What about it?" he asks, feeling the weight drop again into his gut. 

"You're not the only one who's been seeing it. The refinery night shifts report a moving point of light out in the desert, in that direction, almost every night. One or two people say they've seen it in daylight as well, but apparently it's most active after dark."

He isn't sure if this makes him feel better or worse. "Oh," he says, seeing again that strangely unpleasant unpredictable motion. 

"And that isn't all. Stuff's been disappearing."

"Disappearing," Max repeats. 

"Yeah. Things have been going missing overnight--all kinds of things, supplies and scrap and fuel. No one knows who's doing it, nobody's seen anyone creeping around the place, even though they've started to set watches to try and catch the thief." 

"Nobody's seen anything?"

"Well, a couple people. They're pretty fond of their moonshine, though, so nobody's taking it too seriously, and their description doesn't sound like any actual scavengers that might be about."

"What did they say they'd seen?"

"Just some kind of dark shape, low to the ground, that appears and disappears like smoke. Something that comes out of nowhere, and vanishes again." She shrugs. "And it makes a noise. Sometimes they hear a low kind of whistling sound, right before it disappears."

Max stops walking, and she goes on a few steps before realizing she has left him behind; the cold weight in his stomach has turned into a tight buzzing sensation all over him, as if his skin is carrying a charge, like the air before a lightning-storm. There's the familiar thud of adrenaline dumping, and the hallway around him goes very bright and clear. 

"--ax? Max. Hey. You okay?" She snaps her fingers in front of his face and he shivers all over, once, like a dog coming out of deep water. 

"Yeah," he says, and is a little surprised to hear that his voice sounds almost normal. "Yeah. I'm fine."


	10. Chapter 10

This time in the dream it is not his daughter's face that rushes out of shifting shadows, accusing, demanding. This time it is a different face: red-rimmed staring eyes, a rough mane of white hair, yellow-ivory horse teeth in a grinning mask. _You don't know the answers_ , says Immortan Joe. _You don't know anything._

 _You're dead_ , Max tells him, but in the dream he is not entirely sure about this. 

_We all are, Rockatansky._ Behind the mask Joe is smiling. Max can hear it in his voice. _The difference between you and me is that I know it._

_Furiosa killed you._

_Did she?_

_The Wretched tore you apart. I saw it happen. I_ witnessed _it_. 

Joe laughs, a whispery rasping sound, and suddenly Max is back in the golgotha of the wreckage, surrounded by the hulks of dead cars and ruined men. Back in the dwelling-place of the moving point of light. The hissing of windblown sand is very loud. 

_What do you want?_ he asks the wind, and it replies in many voices. 

_Remember--_

_\--suits must be worn at all times when--_

_\--forecast is for--_

_\--said today in a press conference that--_

_\--search for survivors now enters its--_

_\--My God, cover your heads, and get out of the boiling rain--_

_\--this is Delta Fox X-ray--_

_\--by Flight Captain G.L. Walker has not been heard from--_

_\--remember--_

_\--we stand today on the edge of a new frontier--_

_\--are reminded to remain underground--_

_\--lightly down your darkened way--_

_\--only forever--_

_\--when the black rains fell--_

_\--under--_

_\--underground--_

_\--remember living in the sun--_

_\--remember--_

 

The voices repeat one another, a tangled snarl of sound and music layering over and over itself, beating against Max's head like soft but implacable wings, and he thinks he can feel the bones of his skull creak with the pressure, a drilling icepick pain sinking between his eyes, and then someone is shaking him. Shaking him, and saying his name. 

He opens his eyes to find Furiosa's face close to his own. The pain trickles away with the panic as he gets his breathing under control, and the edges of the room come back into focus. It's her room, her quarters, and the difference between this and the room he's been staying in is subtle but unmistakable: this is space owned by someone. 

"What was it?" she asks, when he's a little more together. He scrubs his hands over his face, sitting up in bed, trying to get the memory to coagulate enough to be described. 

"I don't know," he says, at last. "Joe was there. And the wreck. And voices. Some of it was...familiar, like I'd heard it before."

"Whose voices?"

Max shakes his head. "Not the War Boys. At least not just them. Voices from before the world moved on."

 _As the world fell,_ he thinks, _each of us in our own way was broken._

"You're going to have to go back out there, aren't you," she says, and it isn't a question.

"Yeah."

"I'm coming with you."

Furiosa leans back against the pillows beside him, her right arm folded behind her head. Max looks at her, seeing again the bone-deep determination that had driven her through the last battle, through the pain, through the loss of blood. It's always there in her face, even when she's smiling that little half-smile the way she is doing now. 

There are a lot of things Max could say, and he is still a little amazed by the wonder of the fact that he doesn't _have_ to say a damn thing. He just looks at her, meets the blue-gold heavy-lidded gaze without a word, because everything he needs to communicate has already been understood. 

When he lies back down beside her, she fits herself into the answering curl of his body, her back to his chest; and when he tentatively puts an arm around her she pulls it tighter, covering his hand with hers. 

~

Dawn in the desert: blue leaching away into the sand as the new sun wakes it to delicate rose and gold, shadows stretching far into the west. The stone of the Citadel still holds the night's chill. Leaning against it, Max can feel his own warmth drawn away into that larger coldness, running out of him like a drawn thread, like blood. 

The sun is only just up, a flat slice of fire on the eastern horizon. Away to the north the flues and stacks of Gastown are bright gold in the new light. He is aware objectively, distantly, that this is beautiful, and wonders why he feels as if this matters. 

Above him machinery clanks and squeals into reluctant action, and he detaches himself from the wall and looks up to see Furiosa and the mutant Jag descending on the platform. It is so early that very few people are about; the workers of the night shifts not yet coming to bed, the day's shifts not yet awake, and they have few witnesses other than the crew working the lift. 

If everything goes according to plan, they won't be gone long enough for it to matter. 

The platform comes to rest in the sand, and Furiosa lights the Jag's engine and rolls forward until she's clear. Max stays where he is a moment longer, letting his weirdly specific recall settle over the details of this scene. He doesn't know why he wants to fix this moment in his memory so much, but the desire is undeniable. Colors, first

_how blue the kid's eyes had been_

and foremost: the soft powdery blue-grey of the shadows, the sky shading from lemon-yellow through delicate green to the clear blue of the fading night in which a few stars are still visible; the warmer hue of the sun on red rock and gold sand. The light, caught and held along curves of metal and glass. The low throaty rumble of the Jag's straight-six ticking over. The vastness of the rock towers around them, and the even greater emptiness of the wasteland beyond, and what might lie in it. All these things Max notices, with a vague expression on his face, and when Furiosa leans over and calls his name, it takes a moment before he shakes himself to get his mind back in the now.

"Get in, fool," she says. "If we're doing this, then let's do this."

He gets in, and as soon as the door closes behind him she lets in the clutch and the Jag's huge rear tires bite into the sand. 

~

They are halfway there when she flicks a glance at him and says "So, you have a plan?"

"No," he says, truthfully. 

"Ah."

"I don't know what's out there. What we're gonna see. If we see anything."

Furiosa taps the fingers of her left hand reflectively against the wheel: _clack, clack, clack_. "Well, there's _something_ out there carrying a light around. Whatever it is might be raiding Gastown, so there's a chance it's armed."

He feels instinctively for the shotgun in its holster. Yeah, good, still there. 

_Clack, clack_. "And either it wants to kill us or it doesn't, but there's no question that it's got the drop. No way to sneak up on something in daylight from thirty miles away across the desert."

"Mmh," he says. 

"So if you got any bright ideas, now would be the time to share them."

"Mmh," he says again, and closes his eyes tight, rubbing at his temples. She doesn't say anything, and when he looks over at her, she keeps her eyes on the road. _Clack, clack, clack_.

"...I'm bait," he says. 

Now she turns to him. "You're what?"

"I'll be the bait. I'm expendable. You're the better shot. You stay with the car and keep me covered."

"And you're going to, what, walk out there and start yelling _here I am, come get me_?"

Max shrugs. "It's seen me before."

"What if it decides it wants to shoot you this time?"

"Then it shows you where it is," he says. "You won't need more than one shot, once you got a fix on it."

"This is a terrible plan," says Furiosa. 

~

 _This was a terrible plan_ , he thinks, walking with slow measured steps toward the wreckage. The sense of being watched isn't there yet, or not anywhere near as badly as he'd felt it before, but it is still taking every ounce of Max's willpower to keep on walking without looking back or drawing the shotgun. Sand crunches and sighs under his boots. The smell of death is still here, all around him, wafting on the wind, and as he passes the anonymous hulks half-drifted in new dunes he can hear the faint roar of flies. Still something here for them to eat. 

Max wishes he hadn't just thought that. 

He paces into the wreckage, toward the humped ruin of the Rig and the Doof Wagon beyond it, toward the cairn of speaker-parts he'd built over Rictus's grave, and still nothing hails him, nothing remarks on his presence. More sand has built up over the wreckage now, making it an easier climb over the twisted tanker-trailer, and he stands on top of it peering down into the canyon beyond, scanning for movement. 

Nothing. 

Nothing as far as the eye can see, just blowing sand, and the gleam of metal here and there where the wind has uncovered some promontory of scrap. Max notices that there _has_ been something else here, since his last visit; some of the wrecks he remembers are no longer present. Salvage for the Citadel, he thinks, and wonders if the Boys sent out here to retrieve the rolling iron saw anything untoward.

He can feel Furiosa watching him, now, from a distance, but it's not the skin-crawling sensation of before so much as a kind of silent, tacit reassurance: _I'm here_. Max wants to wave, to let her know he's okay, but drawing attention to her presence at this point is exactly what must not be done. He hopes she can read that in the set of his shoulders, the lines of his back, through the rifle scope, and scans the canyon below again. 

Nothing. 

Nothing at all, and then in the space between one breath and the next the light is _there_ , the light is _all around him_ , flickering, dazzling, brilliant, and the sibilant whisper of windblown sand becomes a hiss, becomes a roar, becomes the sound of a million fly-wings buzzing on a thousand carrion-heaps. Blinded, deafened, caught inside the roaring light, Max stumbles back--and the sand beneath his feet is no longer steady but sliding. He flails for balance and finds none, nothing to catch and hold on to. He is falling and then he is rolling over and over as the whole dune begins to move, he is covered in sand, drowning in sand, tumbling into the hissing heart of the light, and he is just about able to think _Oh good I'm dying, soon this will be over and I'll be out of it_ before all the world turns black.

~

Furiosa had watched him walking into the ruins, following him with binoculars, the rifle beside her. She knew him well enough now to understand him without words, and as he climbed up a hill of sand and wreckage she could read tension, but not fear, in his movements. 

Now he pauses on top of the hill, looking beyond it at the rest of the debris, for long enough that she begins to wonder if there really _is_ anything here but ruined cars and dead men; and she has almost made up her mind to come and join him, plan or no plan, when the light snaps on. 

She has never seen it before, even from a distance, and she jerks backwards with a startled curse, blinking to try to clear the afterimages from her vision; when she can see again, she lets go of the binoculars, grabs the rifle, and begins to run. In the distance the little dark figure that is Max is rolling helplessly down the side of the dune, tumbling over and over like a discarded doll, barely visible beyond the glaring blue-white light. She yells something, but yelling takes breath she needs right now for sprinting, and the terrible roaring hissing sound that accompanies the light drowns it out. Somewhere Furiosa is aware that the sound is _familiar_ , the sound is something she has heard before, and she is still trying to figure out what it is when both sound and light first begin to dwindle and shrink and then vanish entirely. 

There is no sign of Max when she gets to the place where it had been. There is no sign of anything but sand. 

Furiosa falls to her knees and begins to dig, desperately, finding nothing beyond her scrabbling fingers but sand and more sand. She looks wildly around, flails over to wrench a broken door-panel from a half-buried car, using it as a makeshift shovel to dig deeper, calling his name. 

Calling his name, and then screaming it. 

Her fingers are raw and bleeding when she finally stops, panting and almost voiceless, slumping to her hands and knees in the crater she has dug. 

_I'm expendable_. 

"No," Furiosa says, rasping, tasting copper in the back of her throat. "No, you're not."

The sun moves through the sky and he is still gone. She will be missed at the Citadel. Both of them will be. Furiosa has work that needs to be done.

She sits back on her heels, and takes a handful of sand from the bottom of the crater, letting it sift through her fingers; and then draws the closed hand to her heart. When she gets up, she sways and nearly stumbles, dizzy as if she has lost blood.

 _No_ , she thinks. _The ground moved._

Just as she thinks this there is another shiver from beneath her feet, and she is horrified to find that she is sinking. The sand shifts all around her, and that hissing is back, sudden, loud enough to hurt--and then she is no longer sinking but _falling_ , as the desert opens up to claim her and draw her down into the dark.

~

Max is a little surprised to find that being dead is painful. 

He's lying on his back, on something hard. It's dark, and after brief experimentation he determines that this is because his eyes are shut, but opening them doesn't seem to do much good. His face hurts. All of him hurts, actually. He feels rather as if he has recently been mashed. 

The darkness seems to be that of an enclosed space. It has the musty dead feeling of somewhere that has spent a long, long time shut up and undisturbed. Somewhere nearby people are talking. Female voices. Max thinks they're vaguely familiar, but his currently scrambled brains aren't up to the task of figuring out why. He stops trying, and just listens instead. 

"...knocked out when I hit the ground," one of them is saying. "Came round much later to find everything was over, and most of 'em were dead. Thought everyone was, till Valkyrie caught up with me that night. Lucky I was out of ammo, I thought she was one'f _them_ come to finish me off."

There's quiet laughter. "The day you can't tell me from a gearhead will be the day what's left of the world ends," says another voice, and now Max can place it and its owner. A little smile tugs at his sand-scoured face. "We didn't know what had happened, Furiosa. Found the wreckage, didn't find you. We thought it was better to stay low while we healed up a bit."

"Scavenged what we could out of the wrecks," says the other Vuvalini. Max can't remember her name. "Includin' _him_."

"Why?" That's Furiosa. Max lets out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding. 

"Well, we argued a bit," says the Vuvalini, "but we figured if worse comes to worst we could always eat 'im, even if he ain't all that pretty. Bit of decent muscle on that one. Not as good as your man, but better'n Capable's kid."

More laughter, and he is very much aware that there is a kind of fellowship between them that he will never entirely be able to understand. "So what happened?" Furiosa asks. "You've been hiding down here all this time. What is this place? And what's that thing we saw?"

"It's dead," says the Valkyrie. "It's the dead talking."

There is a pause, and Max can hear the faint echo of the hissing sound the light had made--the hissing sound he had mistaken for windblown sand, and for the voices of dead boys. Now that he hears it again, here in the underground, he realizes what the sound actually is, and where he has heard it before now. And she's not wrong.

Everything seems to slide neatly into place.

Despite the stiffness and pain he makes himself first sit and then stand up, reaching out for the dimly-seen wall of the tunnel to steady himself while his head sings and spins; then, following the faint light from an archway to his right, he hobbles along until he can look into the chamber where the women are sitting. A fourth figure is lying curled in an anonymous huddle of blankets, in the dimness beyond them, which Max glances at and then ignores. They look up when he appears, and all three of them instinctively reach for their weapons. Max has to fight the urge to put his hands up. 

"Um," he says. "It's...a recording. It's static. Interference. White noise."

The Valkyrie nods. She looks the worse for wear, like all of them, but very much alive. "When we found these tunnels--fell into them, actually, the way you did--the disturbance must have woken something up."

"What is this place?" he asks, belatedly looking around. It's not rock-cut and rough like the Citadel; even ruined and shut up for however long, these tunnels are unmistakably the result of sophisticated technology. 

"Some kind of shelter," says the other Vuvalini. "What's left of it. There's tunnels going every which way, but most of 'em are collapsed, or threatenin' to collapse."

He thinks of the way the light had vanished, reappeared, moving from place to place. "It must be some kind of projection. A message from back when this place was being used."

"There's voices, sometimes. Mostly it's just that hiss, but it talks to you sometimes, says the same thing over again."

Max nods. "Part of a projection. It's...gotten corrupted. Broken. Stuck in a loop."

"What do the voices say?" Furiosa asks. 

"All kinds of stuff. None of it makes any sense," says the Vuvalini. "Bunch of nonsense about forecasts, and counts of something per hour. And a city," she adds. "Some city that's long gone and dead."

" _The city of mirror-glass_ ," Furiosa and Max say, almost in unison, staring at one another, and down the broken hall the crash and hiss of ancient static rises as if in answer.


	11. Chapter 11

They have to get back--both Max and Furiosa know they will have been missed, alarms sounded, possibly searchers sent out after them--but neither wants to leave without hearing the thing speak. Eventually it's agreed that Max should go back to the Jag and fire off a flare. Sooner or later reinforcements from the Citadel will arrive. 

The Vuvalini--her name is Jannah--waits for him at the entrance they've been using to the underground complex, a passage that comes out in a crack between the rocks of the canyon wall. Without her there he would probably never have found the way back in: the entry is amazingly well hidden. 

He says as much to her, taking a last look at the westering sky before following her back into the tunnels, lit by the ancient mantle-lantern she carries. "The people who built this place knew what they were doing," she says. "One branch of the tunnels goes all the way to that refinery settlement. Probably toward your place as well, but that part of the system's collapsed, there's no way to dig through the cave-in."

"You've been raiding Gastown for supplies," he says. "They think you're ghosts. Well...nobody knew what to think, about the moving light."

"That's what it's called, Gastown? Unimaginative lot you are. Yeah, we've been sneaking out there at night to pinch what we needed. Didn't know what the situation was out at your Citadel, didn't want to find out the hard way that you'd lost."

"Were you watching when I came back?"

"Yup. Built that great big simpleton a nice cairn, you did, and then took off like a blue-arsed fly when the thing started whispering again. Not that I blame you, it scared six kinds of hell out'f us the first time it showed up."

"What happened?" 

"Well, Valkyrie and me were makin' our way along in moderately poor shape, night was fallin', we made for the canyon hoping to find somewhere safe to camp. Wrecks all around us, bodies lyin' about, it was a right mess. We think everyone's dead, but one'f the wrecks starts moaning and carrying on, so we go to have a look and find there's a live one left."

Max thinks of the fourth figure lying in its heap of blankets, and then about Nux still hanging on in the crushed cab, against all odds. "You didn't look in the Rig?"

"No we didn't, the reason bein' that just as we pull this bugger out of his wreck the sand gives a heave and collapses underneath the three of us, and down we all fall into a tunnel. Val and me are put ever so slightly out of countenance, as you may imagine, but Staples fair sets up a howl that's like to bring the rest of the ceiling down. Good set of lungs on that boy."

"Staples?"

"Got half an ironmonger's embedded in his face. He was the one on that stripped old Interceptor trying to overtake the Rig at the end there, lyin' draped out over the bonnet spittin' go-juice like it was going out of style."

Max grunts. 

"Why, you know him?"

"That was _my_ car," he says. 

Jannah thumps him on the shoulder. "We can wake 'im up and you can give 'im a pummel, if you like."

"That's okay," he says, but the idea is just a little tempting. "Why _did_ you rescue him?"

"Not really sure, if I'm honest," she says. "He ain't what you might call a scintillatin' conversationalist, I have to say."

"Go on. What happened next?" 

"Well, we give 'im a tap on the chin to shut him up before the ceiling falls in on us, and gather our wits to have a bit of a look around. It's pitch black and we got no torches, but this don’t turn out to be too much of a difficulty on account of the tunnel suddenly lighting up bright blue with a giant glowin' translucent head staring right at us. At which point Val and me both give a yell of our own."

"Christ," Max mutters. "It was a picture? Not just the white static?"

"Sure as I'm talkin' to you now. Great big man's head with the mouth opening and shutting like anything, but no sound at first, and then that came too--big boomin' voice, sort of plummy-like, goin' on about the weather. It didn't quite match up, the mouth and the words, and that somehow made it worse."

He nods. "I believe it."

"Anyway, after the initial shock we realize it ain't talkin' to us, exactly. It breaks off halfway through a sentence and kind of jumps and then starts all over again. It gives enough light that we can see to do a bit of exploring, and we find a lantern and some junk to make torches out of before it turns off again. Next time it comes it's somewhere else and it's just the white snow and hissing. Can't predict where and when it'll show up."

"You can see it from a distance," Max says. "From a long distance, at night."

"I know. It seems to find its way up through holes in the earth. I saw it from Gastown once, it was unnervin' even though I knew what I was looking at."

"It is that," he agrees. And it is a vast and unspeakable relief to _know_ what it is; he feels lighter, easier in his own mind, than he has for a while now. 

"What's this about a mirror city?" she wants to know. 

"It's a long story."

"I've got time," Jannah says. They have been walking through the tunnel fairly slowly, talking; now they can hear Furiosa and Valkyrie up ahead. Max nods. 

"She's better. With words," he says. "Best let her do the telling."

Jannah looks at him oddly, eyes bright in her weatherbeaten face. It is a very _old_ look, somehow, older than it has any right to be, even coming from someone her age. 

"What?" he asks. 

"Just wonderin' about you," she says. "Wonderin' who you really are, chary man. Where you come from. What you want."

Max shrugs, holding her gaze, even though this is difficult, and after a moment she just nods as if he has given her an answer. 

~

Furiosa _is_ better than him with words, among other things, and she outlines what has happened since their return to the Citadel, sketching in the salient points without bothering with detail. While she tells them about the War Boys, about Joe's Big Lie and what Corpus had said, Max approaches the blanket-wrapped form of their captive, kneeling down to get a closer look. 

The last time he had seen this particular and extremely memorable face, it had been yelling invective at sixty miles an hour from the front of his ill-used Interceptor. It is not noticeably improved by several healing bruises and scrapes, or the rough stitch somebody has put into one of the cheek scars to take the place of a lost staple, and even without the skull paint it is a nasty shade of shiny pale grey. Max rests the back of his hand briefly against one cheek, takes it away again, sits back on his heels. 

"This one's on fire," he says, aware of a faint but present nasty smell, even over the general mustiness of the tunnels. Slit's eyes--one hazy too-bright grey, one half-eclipsed by blood--open a little way. Max watches as they move, trying to fix on his own face. 

"I know," says the Valkyrie. "We've done what we could, but he needs more than that. We'd just about decided to chance it and try to make the journey to the Citadel, hoping we'd find you there and not the dictator."

"What's wrong with him?" Furiosa asks, and the Valkyrie just shrugs ruefully, as if to say _see for yourself_. Max carefully lifts the blanket away. 

It's obvious now why they'd been stealing medical supplies as well as food and water, and equally obvious that Valkyrie is right: it's not enough. Slit's right side is a multicolored mess of burns, bruises and jagged cuts held together with stick-on steristrips, but this pales into insignificance compared with what's happened to his right arm. 

Max whistles softly. They've splinted it as best they can, but there are twists and bumps in the forearm that absolutely should not be there, visible even through the swelling. The source of the nasty smell is evident: ominous yellow and red streaks are beginning to spread up the arm from underneath the bandaging. 

"That's got to come off," he says grimly, replacing the blanket over the horrible sight. Slit's eyes close again. "Soon."

"We can't--" Furiosa says, but gets no further, interrupted by a sudden and much louder voice. Blue light spills into the chamber from the tunnel beyond.

_"--reminded that all residents are advised to remain inside until further notice, as a low-pressure system is moving in from the northeast and storms are expected with potentially hazardous levels of activity over the next forty-eight hours. Residents will be permitted to return to the surface as soon as readings indicate activity has returned to acceptable levels. Again, please remain indoors until further notice."_ The voice pauses, and then continues in a more upbeat tone. _"Tonight's entertainment feature will be a performance of_ Kiss Me, Kate _in the main threedy theater, with episodes of_ The Good Life _playing in threedy cinema two and the documentary_ Blue Planet _, suitable for all ages, in threedy cinema three. In the news, still no word of what has been called the Olive Branch Flight under the command of Captain G. L. Walker, and experts are warning that the likelihood of a successful mission is not high, but the public faith in Captain Walker remains stead--"_

It cuts off with an electronic yelp and then a moment later begins again: _"--reminded that all residents are advised to remain inside until further notice, as a low-pressure system is moving in from the northeast..."_

All of them listen as it repeats the announcement a second, and then a third time, before fading away into the crash and mutter of static and then dwindling to silence. 

"Lovely voice it's got," says Jannah, and the spell is broken; even Max laughs a little. "Gets a bit monotonous though, if you know what I mean."

Another country is heard from: Slit moans, a nasty clotted sound. "I have a feeling there's more that thing can tell us," says Furiosa, looking over at him. "But the kid needs help. Max?"

He nods. "The others should be on their way. I'll go keep watch. The blanket'll work in a pinch to carry him, but some kind of stretcher would be best. You go with them, leave the Jag. I'll stay here and do some listening."

Furiosa looks as if she's considering arguing, but just nods. "Okay. Be careful."

"I will."

~

When he is alone again, Max paces through the crumbling hallways, not sure what it is he's waiting to hear, not knowing why he's so sure he ought to be the one to hear it. Maybe it's just because he has spent so much of the past weeks with his head focused on this place and the things that dwell, or have dwelled, here. 

_Maybe I'm just mad_ , he thinks, trailing a hand along the surface of the wall as he goes. The walls and ceiling are made out of some kind of precast plastoid material, cracked here and there and letting in the desert. Panels in the ceiling presumably once lit up, but the only illumination now is the lantern Max carries swinging from one hand. Crazy shadows dance and sway all around him, giving the illusion that countless small things are moving just out of sight. 

Twice he has seen the talking head again, giving its by-now-familiar recitation of announcements, and once the hallway has filled with brilliant blue-white static through which he was almost certain he could catch words. He has had to turn back several times when the tunnel he is walking through dead-ends in a spill of sand and rock; and he thinks the distant thump and shudder he hears at one point may be another cave-in, deeper in the network of tunnels. _Be careful_ , Furiosa says in his head, and again he nods, but it still doesn't feel as if he's seen or heard what it is he is meant to see or hear. 

The rooms he passes are full of strange things that seem faintly familiar. In one there are long tables with plastic chairs flanking them, not unlike the refectory tables at the Citadel. In another, racks and racks of bunkbeds with ancient plastic-covered mattresses loom into the shadows. Still others appear to be some kind of classroom. He passes hydroponics chambers, their vats and troughs long-dried and empty of green growing things. Once the thick silence that comes between the manifestations of the old recording is broken by a mechanical whirr, and he feels moving air touch his face: some kind of environmental control still trying gamely to do its job in a world which has moved on and left it behind. 

_These are the rooms of ruin_ , Max thinks, not sure why the words come so clearly. _These are the halls of the dead, where spiders spin and the great circuits fall silent, one by one._

As if summoned by the thought, the voice booms out again, close enough to make him jump, without any hint of the light-show. It is a different voice now, not the rich self-important tones of the newsreel narrator but a woman's voice, sharp and businesslike. 

_"--oing to split up, one group will try to make the Lithgow station and the rest of us are going to the caves of Jenolan, where we hope to find not only shelter but an abundant supply of fresh water. Coordinates follow."_ Then a spate of numbers which Max does not have the presence of mind to try writing with a fingertip in the silt on the tunnel floor. The voice resumes: _"It's evident that desertification is now irretrievably advanced in this region and the levels may remain dangerous for the foreseeable future. There has been no word from Captain Walker and we have lost contact with satellite feeds. All television and radio transmissions have ceased--or our receivers are no longer capable of picking up their signal."_ Now the woman sounds less official and more uncertain, tired, human. _"If we are successful, most of the settlers will remain at Lithgow and/or Jenolan while an advance party attempts to reach Sydney. We have hopes that at least some of the city is intact, and the deep-level shelters should have protected many residents. We cannot stay here."_ Then a little not-entirely-steady chuckle, and the sound of someone else talking in the background, before the woman comes back again. _"Chief Engineering Officer Thuring suggests another die-hard, Captain Scott, ought to have the last word if we should fail to reach our destination:_ these rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale. _This is Medical Officer Mary McBride of Shelter Complex Two Four Nine Eight Five, signing off."_

Silence, and Max counts his own heartbeats. He is up to twenty when something clicks and Mary McBride starts her last speech again. This time when she lists the coordinates, he is ready, and he scribbles them down in the dust as she reads the numbers one by one. 

The recording does not repeat itself a third time. Max fishes out a crumpled, much-abused scrap of cloth on which the rough map of the waste lands shows their route to and from the edge of the salt, and pricks his similarly much-abused thumb with a needle to ink the numbers and letters into the cloth. When he has them properly, he sweeps a hand across the coordinates written in the floor-dust, erasing them, and sits there for several minutes staring at the space where they had been. 

When he does rise to his feet, picking up the lantern, he moves with a purpose. The voice had not been accompanied by the visual projection, but the speaker from which it had come was near by, in one of the rooms along this corridor. He wants to find that speaker. He wants it very much, and does not ask himself why this is: he has about given up on finding logical explanations for the things he is sometimes profoundly compelled to do. 

On his third try he strikes lucky. The door to this room is half-closed, its mechanism frozen and choked with sand: he has to slip sideways through the gap between the door and its jamb, and thinks again _the rooms of ruin_. Blank screens stare at him like dead eyes, half a dozen of them arrayed around what looks like a central control console. A microphone stands draped and guy-wired with cobwebs in front of a rolled-back chair, and Max cannot help picturing Officer McBride speaking those last words into the mike, still surrounded by blinking lights and humming energy, before shutting it down for the last time. He cannot help imagining these last few stragglers, the last of the dying world, watching as their screens went dark one by one. He thinks he can almost feel their presence, almost see the way the fading light clings to their radsuits as they file out of this chamber: the last to abandon this place, to consign it to the hunger of the waste lands, to the unending appetite of entropy. 

It feels like sacrilege even to be here, as if he is breaking bone-deep taboos with every breath he takes of this cold dead air. Still, Max crosses the chamber to the console, leans close to puff dust away from the controls. _North Central Positronics_ , a tiny legend under one gauge proclaims. The board is dead, none of the instruments showing any kind of reading at all--except one, Max sees as he blows more dust away, coughing and waving away the acrid clouds. One tiny weak telltale is lit up, glowing faintly green under the words _Auxiliary Power Unit_. Even as he watches, the light flickers and fades from green to amber. 

When the two Vuvalini and their captive fell through into the tunnels, Max realizes, they must have tripped some kind of switch, broken some contact that woke a tiny fraction of this technology back to life--and now the reserves that had powered that fraction are guttering out, almost completely extinct. Frustration like a wave of sickness rises in his throat: there's so _much_ here they could use, learn from, so much they might _need_ , and no way to get it out, no way to light these long-dormant machines back to life. All he can do is watch the last of the power drain itself away in idiot loops of corrupt recordings, snatches of projected image. _Power_ , Max thinks bitterly, _if only we had power_ , and as if stirred up from the depths another thought presents itself: _guzzoline._

_Of course. Of course we have power._

He straightens up, scrubbing both hands through his hair, excitement flickering inside him. _We have as much_ power _as Gastown has gas._

Close on the heels of that thought comes another one: _as long as we can keep this place from collapsing entirely_ , and Max is careful--very careful--as he makes his way out of the tunnels again, out of the concealed entrance in the canyon into the blue light of dusk, and only then does he break into a run. 

~

Later, much later, back at the Citadel, he's got his raggedy map out and is comparing it to the much bigger and more beautiful ones Miss Giddy had drawn, muttering to himself. Nux has to clear his throat twice before Max blinks and turns around to see him leaning in the doorway. 

"Hey," he says. "How's the leg?"

"It's fine." Nux crutches his way over, moving with surprising efficiency, to join Max at the table. "Slit's out of surgery."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. They don't know yet."

Max nods. Having your arm off is a hell of a difficult thing to live through even if you aren't weakened already by infection and blood loss, but on the other hand he thinks if Slit had survived the Interceptor's demise there wasn't much short of a triphammer that might actually end him. "Did you get a chance to talk to him?"

"Yeah," Nux says again. "Dunno if any of it got through. He was...he was in pretty rough shape."

"I know." 

Nux draws closer, leaning on the crutches, looking down at the maps. "What's this?"

"One of the things the recording said. The people from that shelter were leaving, trying to reach..." He has to smile a little. "To reach their own green place, I guess. No way of knowing if they got there, but they left a record with exactly where they were trying to go."

"You think there might _be_ a green place for real?" Nux asks. He sounds tired, and Max gives him a considering look: yeah, still too thin, still a bit haggard, almost certainly working himself too hard. 

"Maybe," Max tells him. "That'll keep. Right now what we need to do is shore that lot up, stop any more of the tunnels caving in, and work out a way to power up their stuff with our generators." 

Nux looks at him-- _Christ, his eyes are blue_ \--and Max gives him sixty percent of a smile. "Might could use you on that, blackthumb," he says. "Unless you got too much work to do back here."

"I got some projects," Nux says, but he's smiling too, the scars pulling awkwardly as his mouth curves. "But I guess I could put that on hold for a while. Just to help out."

A few weeks ago Max would probably not have done what he does now: reaches over to rub the pale vault of Nux's head with a rough kind hand, and lets the kid lean against him. "Good," he says. "That's good."


End file.
